'& 

*%>. 




Her dark "but prettily- routed arm was decked -with a 
let of silver pieces; and. just "between two of the fine:: 
I ever saw, was suspended, "by a Arellow thread, one of the 
small poid cains of Ccnstar.! C softly moulded Trust 

was entirely "bare, and might hare seF 

f X"VOUll:' 






IL IL .H S , 

•JOfTE.' -~ZZ "SZWG&BY B&EX 

-- - 




PENCILLINGS 

BY THE WAY. 
\ 



~ 



> — 

BY N. P. WILLIS, ESQ., 



AUTHOR OF * PEOPLE I HAVE MET,' ' HURRY-GRAPHS,' 
' LIFE HERE AND THERE,' &C. 



SEVENTH EDITION. 



LONDON : 
tIENRY G. BOHN, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN. 

1864. 



• Wrse 



Exchange 
Western Ont. Univ. ll- rary 
Feb- 25- 1938 



PREFACE 



TO 



THE SECOND EDITION. 



In putting forth a Second Edition of Pencillings by (fit 
Way, I cannot but express a surprise (which I doubt not, 
will be shared by the critics) that a work so hastily written, 
and published with such doubt and unwillingness, should 
have met, I will not say with such decided success, but 
with so extensive a sale. Having staked no feeling upon it, 
its failure in this respect would have given me no more 
pain than the trenchant criticism with which it has been 
distinguished; while the rapid disposal of a very large 
edition, and what little kindness it has met from reviewers, 
have given me, I may say, almost a gratuitous pleasure. 

Having thus, however, like the traveller in the fable, 
abandoned my cloak to the lion, I have stood aloof with 
some interest to see how it would be torn in pieces. The 
errors of my book (numerous from its very nature) have 
been skilfully detected, and I sincerely thank those critics 
to whose judicious comments this new edition will appear 
indebted. To those who have thought it necessary in re- 
viewing the book of a stranger, to attack his parents, his 

a 2 



PREFACE TO 

country, and his private character, no reply is necessary 
here — none anywhere, indeed, except when the writer is 
responsible for his words in some other character than that 
of a critic. Public opinion in England, while it tolerates 
the offence, punishes with sufficient severity the offender. 
It is only those who are removed from the fountains of 
literature who imagine that the inventive hirelings of such 
reviews are either seen or named among the honest men 
with whom they claim fellowship. 

Among the more respectable reviewers, I notice a dispo- 
sition which I comment upon, because I think it the main 
fault even of the higher school of criticism in this country. 
It is that of finding fault with a book on points to which it 
never pretended excellence. In a notice of these volumes 
in the Edinburgh Review, for instance, (a notice written 
unquestionably in a kind and just spirit, and which I quote 
as a strong example for that very reason) there is the fol- 
lowing passage : (The reader will remember that the title 
of the book is Pencillings by the Way.} 

ee In those more important matters which unfold to us 
the condition of a people, and which are learnt by inquiry, 
study, and reflection, let not the reader hope to be enlight- 
ened. The work is eminently superficial. Its author is 
observant, but the character of his mind is not reflective. 
He is not prone to speculate and philosophise ; and an 
abstract sentiment rarely escapes him ! " 

I ask, would any reader buying a book called Pencillings 
by the Way, require to be put on his guard lest he should 
expect to find in it " study," " reflection," and " abstract 
sentiments ? " The object of my letters was simply and 
unambitiously to amuse. For instruction the reader does 
not go to a book of Pencillings. With this object in mind, 
I recorded nakedly and faithfully my First Impressions, 



THE SECOND EDITION. V 

they were as correct and as deep and " abstract " as first 
impressions usually are. They were written, as I have else- 
where mentioned, with every species of interruption, and 
dispatched, " unshrived," by the first post, and to re- write 
them by my subsequent observation would be to write a 
new book. 

It will be seen by the dates added to this edition, thai 
there were considerable intervals of time between some of 
my letters from the Continent, and, (a circumstance which 
I wish particularly to be understood) that, though I have 
been in England nearly two years, these letters end with 
the first four months after my arrival. My impressions of 
England then ceased to be first impressions, and therefore 
were unfitted to the previous design of my letters ; and I 
found occasion so often to correct my Pencillings by the 
Way, that I ceased to write altogether. Why it is more 
difficult to write hastily of England than of other countries 
will be apparent to those who have travelled. In other 
countries the objects of interest are classic or physical, and 
reducible to known standards ; in England they are social 
or moral, and require diligent observation and study. 

I commit my letters once more to the public with a 
strong impression of the truth of Southey's remark— that 
the best book (and, a fortiori, the worst) does bvt little good 
to the world, and much harm to the author. 

N. P. Wiixid. 

London, March i\ 1836. 



PREFACE 

TO 

THE FIRST EDITION. 



[t is common for authors in their Prefaces to give their 
reasons for publishing, Mine is a novel one — I cannot help 
it. On the eve of a late departure for the Continent, I 
was informed, for the first time, that two editions of the 
following work were in the press. Having no control over 
the imperfect copy which the publishers had obtained from 
periodicals, my only choice was between these crude editions 
and a corrected and enlarged one superintended by myself. 
I have chosen the least of two evils. 

The extracts from these letters which have appeared in 
the public prints have drawn upon me much severe censure. 
Admitting its justice in part, perhaps I may be allowed to 
shield myself from its remaining excess by a slight explana- 
tion. During several years' residence in Continental and 
Eastern countries, I have had opportunities (as attache to a 
foreign legation) of seeing phases of society and manners 
not usually described in books of travel. Having been the 
editor, before leaving the United States, of a Monthly 
Review, I found it both profitable and agreeable to continue 
my interest in the periodical in which that Review was 
merged at my departure, by a miscellaneous correspondence. 
Foreign courts, distinguished men, royal entertainments, 
&c. &c, — matters which were likely to interest American 
readers more particularly, — have been in turn my themes. 
The distance of America from these countries, and the 
ephemeral nature and usual obscurity of periodical corre- 
spondence, were a sufficient warrant to my mind that my 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. Vll 

descriptions would die where they first saw the light, and 
fulfil only the trifling destiny for which they were in- 
tended. I indulged myself, therefore, in a freedom of 
detail and topic which is usual only in posthumous memoirs 
— expecting as soon that they would be read in the coun- 
tries and by the persons described, as the biographer of 
Byron and Sheridan that these fruitful and unconscious 
themes would rise from the dead to read their own interest- 
ing memoirs. And such a resurrection would hardly be a 
more disagreeable surprise to that eminent biographer, than 
was the sudden appearance to me of my own unambitious 
letters in the Quarterly Review. 

The reader will see (for every letter containing the least 
personal detail has been most industriously re-published in 
the English papers) that 1 have in some slight measure 
corrected these Pencillings by the Way. They were lite- 
rally what they were styled — notes written on the road, 
and dispatched without a second perusal ; and it would be 
extraordinary, if, between the liberty I felt with my ma- 
terial, and the haste in which I scribbled, some egregious 
errors in judgment and taste had not crept in unawares. 
The Quarterly has made a long arm over the water to re- 
fresh my memory on this point. There are passages (I 
only wonder they are so few) which I would not re-write, 
and some remarks on individuals which I would recall at 
some cost, and would not willingly see repeated in these 
volumes. Having conceded thus much, however, I may 
express my surprise that this particular sin should have been 
visited upon me at a distance of three thousand miles, when 
the reviewer's own literary fame rests on the more aggra- 
vated instance of a book of personalities* published under 
the very noses of the persons described. 

• Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk*' 



Vlll PREFACE TO THE FIRsT EDITION. 

Those of my letters which date from England were 
written within three or four months of my first arrival in 
this country. Fortunate in my introductions, almost em- 
barrassed with kindness, and, from advantages of compari- 
son gained by long travel, qualified to appreciate keenly the 
peculiar delights of English society, I was little disposed to 
find fault. Every thing pleased me. Yet in one instance 
r— one single instance — I indulged myself in stricture upon 
individual character, and I repeat it in this work, sure that 
there will be but one person in the world of letters who 
will not read it with approbation — the editor of the Quar- 
terly himself. It was expressed at the time with no per- 
sonal feeling, for I had never seen the individual concerned, 
and my name had probably never reached his ears. I but 
repeated what I had said a thousand times, and never with- 
out an indignant echo to its truth — an opinion formed from 
the most dispassionate perusal of his writings — that the 
editor of that Review was the most unprincipled critic of 
the age. Aside from its flagrant literary injustice, we owe 
to the Quarterly, it is well known, every spark of ill feel- 
ing that has been kept alive between England and Ame- 
rica for the last twenty years. The sneers, the opprobrious 
epithets of this bravo in literature have been received in a 
country where the machinery of reviewing was not under- 
stood, as the voice of the English people, and an animosity 
for which there was no other reason has been thus periodi- 
cally fed and exasperated. I conceive it to be my duty as a 
literary man — I know it is my duty as an American — to lose 
no opportunity of setting my heel on the head of this rep- 
tile of criticism. He has turned and stung me. Thank 
God, I have escaped the slime of his approbation. 



CONTENTS. 



VOL. I. 



LETTER 1. 

PART*. 

Clwtera— Rioting— H6tel Dieu • . . Page t— 7 

LETTER II. 



VILLA FRANCA. 
* * 

LETTER III. 



7-11 



NICE. 

Italian summer-morning— New arrivals — Companions — Departure from the laza- 
retto, &c • . . . « 11—16 

LETTER IV. 

FLORENCE. 

Florentine peculiarities — Society — Balls — Ducal entertainments — Privilege of 
strangers — Families of high rank — The exclusives — Soirees — Parties of a rich 
banker — Peasant beauty — A contented married lady — Husbands, cavaliers, and 
wives — Personal manners — Habits of society, &c. . . . 17 — 20 

LETTER V. 

Sienna — Poggiobonsi — Bonconvento — Encouragement of French artists by their 
government — Acquapendente — Poor beggar, the original of a sketch by Cole — 
Bolsena — Volscinium — Scenery — Curious state of the chesnut woods • 20 — 22 

LETTER VI. 

Montefiascone — Anecdote of the wine — Viterbo — Mount Cimino— Tradition — View 
of St. Peter's — Entrance into Rome— A stranger's impressions of the city 22—25 



CONTENTS. 



LETTER VIE 

Appian way — Tomb of Cecilia Metella — Albano — Tomb of the Curiatii — Aricia— 
Temple of Diana — Fountain of Egeria — Lake of Nemi — Velletri — Pontine 
Marshes — Convent — Canal — Terracini — San Felice — Fondi — Story of Julia 
Gonzaga — Cicero's Garden and' Tomb — Mola — Minturna — Ruins of an amphi- 
theatre and temple— Falernian Mount and wine — The Doctor of St. Agatha — 
Capua— Entrance into Naples — The Queen . . Page 26 — 31 

LETTER VIII. 

NAPLES. 

Visit to Herculaneum and Pompeii ..... 31 — 39 

LETTER IX. 

Account of Vesuvius — The hermitage — The famous Lagrima Christi — Difficulties 
of the path — Curious appearance of the old crater — Odd assemblage of travellers 

— The new crater — Splendid prospect — Mr. M. , author of the ' Pursuits of 

Literature '—The Archbishop of Tarento .... 40 — 46 

LETTER X. 

Neapolitan races — Brilliant show of equipages — The king and his orother — Rank 
and character of the jockies — Description of the races — The public burial- 
ground of Naples — The lazzaroni — Frequency of robberies and assassinations — 
The museum of Naples — Ancient relics from Pompeii — The antique chair of 
Sallust— The villa of Cicero — The Balbi family — Gallery of Dians, Cupids, 
Joves, Mercuries, and Apollos, statue of Aristides, &c . 46 — 55 

LETTER XI. 

Baiae — Grotto of Pausilippo — Tomb of Virgil — Pozzuoli — Ruins of the temple of 
Jupiter Serapis — The Lucrine lake — Lake Avernus, the Tartarus of Virgil — 
Temple of Proserpine — Grotto of the Cumaean sibyl — Nero's villa — Cape of 
Misenum — Roman villas — Ruins of the temple of Venus — Cento Camerelle — 
The Stygian lake— The Elysian fields— Grotto del Cani— Villa of Lucullus 56—62 

LETTER XII. 

ROME. 

front of St. Peter's — Equipages of the Cardinals — Beggars — Body of the church- 
Tomb of St. Peter — The Tiber — Fortress-tomb of Adrian — Jews' quarter — 
Forum — Barberini palace — Portrait of Beatrice Cenci — Her melancholy history 
— Picture of the Fornarini — Likeness of Giorgione's Mistress — Joseph and Poti- 
phar s wife — The palaces Doria and Sciarra — Portrait of Olivia Waldachini — Of 
'-' a celebrated widow " — Of Semiramis — Claude's landscapes — Brill's — Breughels 
— Notti's '* woman catching fleas " — Da Vinci's Queen Giovanna — Portrait of a 
female Doria — Prince Doria — Palace Sciarra— Brill and Both's landscapes — 
Claude's — Picture of Noah intoxicated — Romana's Fornarini — Da Vinci's two 
Pictures ....... 62— 70 

LETTER XIII. 

Annual dowries to twelve girls — Vespers in the Convent of Santa Trinita — Ruins of 
Roman baths — A magnificent modern church within two ancient halls — Gardens 
of Mecaenas — Tower whence Nero saw Rome on fire — Houses of Horace and 
Virgil — Baths of Titus and Caracalla «... 70 — 74 



CONTENTS. 



LETTER XIV. 

Summer weather in March- Baths of Caracalla — Beginning of the Appian Way- 
Tomb of the Seipios — Catacombs — Church of San Sebastiano — Young Capuchin 
friar — Tombs of the early Christian martyrs — Chamber where the apostles wor- 
shipped- Tomb of Cecilia Metella — The Campagna — Circus of Caracalla or 
Romulus — Temple dedicated to Ridicule — Keat's grave — Fountain of Egeria — 
Holy week ...... Page 75 — 79 

LETTER XV. 

Palm Sunday — Sistine chapel — Entrance of the pope — The choir — The pope on his 
throne — Presenting the palms — Procession — Holy Tuesday-- The Miserere* — 
Accidents in the crov/d — Tenebrae — The emblematic candles — A soiree— Holy 
Thursday — Frescos of Michael Angelo — " Creation of Eve " — " Lot intoxicated" 
— Delphic Sibyl — Pope washing pilgrims' feet — Pope and cardinals waiting upon 
pilgrims at dinner .... . 79 — 8< 

LETTER XVI. 

Sepulchre of Caius Cestius — Protestant burying-ground — Graves of Keats and 
Shelley — Shelley s lament over Keats — Graves of two Americans — Beauty of the 
burial-place — Monuments over two young females — Inscription on Keats s monu- 
ment — The style of Keats's Poems — Grave of Dr. Bell — Residence and literary 
undertakings of his widow ..... 84 — 88 

LETTER XVII. 

Presentation a t the papal court — Pilgrims going to vespers— Performance of the 
Miserere — Tarpeian Rock — The Forum — Palace of the Caesars — Coliseum 

88—93 
LETTER XVIII. 

Vigils over the host— Ceremonies of Easter Sunday— The procession— High mass — 
The pope blessing the people — Curious illumination — Return to Florence — 
Rural festa— Hospitality of the Florentines — Expected marriage of the Grand 
Duke ..... . 93—97 

LETTER XIX. 

PISA. 

Dulness of the town — Leaning tower — Cruise in the frigate €t United States" — Elba 
— Piombino — Porto Ferrajo — Appearance of the bay — Naval discipline— Visit to 
the town-residence of Napoleon — His employment during his confinement on the 
island— His sisters Eliza and Pauline— His country-house — Simplicity of the 
inhabitants of Elba ...... 97—104 

LETTER XX. 

Departure from Elba — Ischia — Bay of Naples — Naples — San Carlo — Repeated con- 
spiracies — Scene on shipooard — Castellamare • • . 105 — 109 

LETTER XXI. 

Island of Sicily — Palermo— Saracenic appearance of the town — Cathedral— The 
Marina— Viceroy Leopold — Monastery of the Capuchins— Celebrated catacombs 
—Fanciful garden ...... 109—115 



.ONTENTS 



.LETTER XXII. 

The Lunatic Asylum at Palermo — Marina— Distress of the Sicilians — Conspiracies 

Page 116—122 

LETTER XXIIL 

Fete given by Mr. Gardiner, the American consul — Messina — Lipari islands— Scylla 
and Charybdis ....... 122—138 

LETTER XXIV. 

The Adriatic — Albania — Gay costumes and beauty of the Albanese— Capo d'Istria— 
Visit to the Austrian authorities of the province — Curiosity of the inhabitants- 
Gentlemanly reception by the military commandant— Visit to Vienna — Singular 
notions of the Austrians respecting the Americans — Similarity of the scenery to 
that of New England — Meeting with German students — Frequent sights of soldiers 
and military preparations — Picturesque scenery of Styria . . 128 — 134 

LETTER XXV 
Gratz— Vienna— St. Etienne— The tomb of the son of Napoleon . 135—141 

LETTER XXVI. 

VIENNA. 

Magnificence of the emperor's stables — The young queen of Hungary — The palace 
—Hall of curiosities, j ewellery, &c. — The polytechnic school — Geometrical figures 
described by the vibrations of musical notes — Liberal provision for the public 
institutions — Popularity of the emperor . . . 141 — 146 



VOLUME II. 

LETTER I. 

Vienna, palaces and gardens— Mosaic copy of Da Vinci's " Last Supper** — Col- 
lection of warlike antiquities ; Scanderburg*s sword, Montezuma's tomahawk, 
relics of the Crusaders, warriors in armour, the farmer of Augsburgh — Room of 
portraits of celebrated individuals — Gold busts of Jupiter and Juno— The 
Glacis, full of gardens, the general resort of people — Universal spirit of 
enjoyment — Simplicity and confidence in the manners of the Viennese — 
Baden ....... page 147—152 

LETTER II. 
Vienna — The palace of Liechstenstein— Galleries . . . 152- *157 

LETTER III. 
The palace of Schoenbrunn— Heitzing, the summer retreat of the wealthy Vien- 
nese—Country-house of the American consul — Specimen of pure domestic hap- 
piness in a German family — Splendid village ball — Substantial fare for the 
ladies — Curious fashion of cushioning the windows — German grief — The upper 
Belvedere palace — Endless quantity of pictures . . . 157 — 163 



INTENTS. 



LETTER IV. 

Departure from Vienna— The Eil-wagon— Motley quality of the passengers- 
Thunderstorm in the mountains of Styria— Trieste— Short beds of the Ger- 
mans— Grotto of Adelsburg ; curious ball-room in the cavern— Nautical prepar- 
ations for a dance on board the " United States" swept away by the bora— Its 
successful termination . Pa £ e 164—171 

LETTER V. 

Trieste, its extensive commerce— Ruins of Pola— Immense amphitheatre —Village 
of Pola— Coast of Dalmatia, of Apulia, and Calabria— Otranto— The isles of 
Greece . . . • • • • ' 172—175 

LETTER VI. 

GREECE. 

The Ionian isles— Lord N Corfu— Greek and English soldiers— Cockneyism 

The gardens of Alcinous— English officers— Albanians— Dionisio Salomos, 

the Greek poet— Greek ladies— Dinner with the artillery-mess . 176—180 

LETTER VII. 

Corfu— Superstition of the Greeks— Advantage of the Greek costume— The Paxian 
isles— Cape Leucas, or Sappho's leap— Bay of Navarino, ancient Pylos— Modon 
— Coran's bay— Cape St. Angelo— Isle of Cythera . . . 181—187 

LETTER VIII. 

The harbour of Napoli— Tricoupi and Mavrocordato, Otho's cabinet councillors- 
King Otho— Prince of S axe— Miaulis, the Greek admiral— Excursion to Argos, 
the ancient Tirynthus . . . • • I 8 ? — I 95 

LETTER IX. 
ttsit from King Otho and Miaulis— Visits an English and Russian frigate— Beauty 
of the Grecian men— Lake Lerna— The Hermionicus Sinus— Hydra— Egina. 

193—198 

LETTER X. 

The maid of Athens— Romance and Reality— American benefactions to Greece- 
School of Capo D'Istrias— Grecian disinterestedness— Ruins of the most ancient 
temple— Beauty of the Grecian landscape — Hope for the land of Epaminondas 
and Aristides , 198-203 

LETTER XI. 

Athens— Ruins of the Parthenon— The Acropolis— Temple of Theseus— Burial- 
place of the son of Miaulis— Bavarian sentinel— Turkish mosque, erected within 
the sanctuary of the Parthenon — Wretched habitations of the modern 
Athenians 203—208 

LETTER XII. 

The "Lantern of Demosthenes"— Byron's residence in Athens— Temple of Jupi- 
ter Olympus— Superstitious fancy of the Athenians respecting its ruins— Her- 
mitage of a Greek monk— Petarches, the antiquary and poet, and his wife, sister 



CO* TENTS. 

to the "maid of Athens" — Mutilation of a basso-relievo by an English officer— 
The Elgin marbles — The Caryatides — Lord Byron's autograph — The sliding stone 
— A scene in the rostrum of Demosthenes . . Page 209 — 213 

LETTER XIII. 

The prison of Socrates — Turkish stirrups and saddles — Plato's academy — The 
American missionary school at Athens — The son of Petarches, and nephew of 
" Mrs. Black of Egina." , .213—218 

LETTER XIV. 

The Piraeus — The Sacra Via — Ruins of Eleusis — Gigantic medallion — Costume of 
the Athenian women — The tomb of Themistocles — The temple of Minerva 

218—223 

LETTER XV. 

Mitylene — The tomb of Achilles — Turkish burying-ground — Lost reputation of 
the Scamander — Asiatic sunsets — Visit to a Turkish bey — The castles of the 
Dardanelles — Turkish bath, and its consequences . . . 223 — 228 

LETTER XVI. 
A Turkish pic-nic on the plain of Troy — Fingers versus Forks 229—231 

LETTER XVII. 

The Dardanelles — Visit from the Pasha — His delight at hearing the piano- 
Turkish fountains — Caravan of mules laden with grapes — Turkish mode of 
living ; Houses ; Cafes ; and women — The mosque and the muezzin 25 1 — 259 

LETTER XVIII. 

Turkish military life — A visit to the camp — Turkish music — Sunsets — The sea of 
Marmora ........ 259—244 

LETTER XIX.. 

Constantinople — An adventure with the dogs of Stamboul — The Sultan's Kiosk— 
The bazaars — Georgians — Sweetmeats — Hindoostanee Fakeers — Turkish women 
and their eyes — The Jews — A token of home — The drug bazaar — Opium- 
eaters ........ 241—250 

LETTER XX. 

The Bosphorus — Turkish palaces — The Black Sea — Buyukdere . . 251 — 256 

LETTER XXI. 

The sultan's perftimer — Etiquette of smoking — Temptations for purchasers — 
Exquisite flavour of the Turkish perfumes — The slave-market of Constantinople 
— Slaves from various countries, Greek, Circassian, Egyptian, Persian, — 
— African female slaves — An improvisatrice — Exposure for sale, &c. &C.256 — 261 

LETTER XXII. 

Punishment of conjugal infidelity — Drowning in the Bosphorus — Frequency of its 
occurrence accounted for — A band of wild Roumeliotes — Their picturesque ap- 
pearance — Ali Pasha, of Yanina — A Turkish funeral — Fat widow of sultan Selim 
— A visit to the sultan's summer palace — A travelling Moslem — Unexpected 
token of home . \ • • 261—207 



CO* t £NTS. 



LETTER XXIII. 

The Golden Horn and its scenery — The sultan's wives and Arabians — The Valley 
of Sweet Waters — Beauty of the Turkish minarets — The mosque of Sulymanye 
Mussulmans at their devotions — The muezzin — The bazaar of the opium-eaters 
— The mad-house of Constantinople, and description of its inmates — Their 
wretched treatment — The hippodrome and the mosque of Sultan Achmet— The 
Janizaries ...... Page 267 — 275 

LETTER XXIV. 

Sultan Mahmoud at his devotions — Comparative splendour of Papal, Austrian, 
and Turkish equipages — The sultan's barge or caique — Description of the sultan 
— Visit to a Turkish Lancasterian school — The dancing dervishes — Visit from 
the sultan's cabinet — The seraskier and the capitan pasha — Humble origin of 
Turkish dignitaries ...... 275—282 

LETTER XXV. 

The grand bazaar of Constantinople, and its infinite variety of wonders — Silent 
shopkeepers — Female curiosity — Adventure with a black-eyed stranger — The 
bezestein — The stronghold of Orientalism — Picture of a Dragoman — The ki- 
baub-shop ; a dinner without knives, forks, or chairs — Cistern of the thousand- 
and-one columns ....... 283—288 

LETTER XXVI. 

The perfection of bathing — Pipes — Downy cushions — Coffee — Rubbing down— 
" Circular Justice," as displayed in the retribution of boiled lobsters — A deluge 
of suds — The shampoo — Luxurious helps to imagination — A pedestrian excur- 
sion — Story of an American tar burdened with small change — Beauty of the 
Turkish children — A civilised monster — Glimpse at Sultan Mahmoud in an 
ill-humour. . . .... 289—294 



VOLUME III. 



LETTER I. 

Beauties of the Bosphorus — Summer-palace of the Sultan — Adventure with an 
old Turkish woman — The feast of Bairam — The Sultan his own butcher — 
His evil propensities — Visit to the mosques — A formidable dervish — Santa 
Sophia — Mosque of Sultan Achmet — Traces of Christianity . Page 295 — 300 

LETTER II. 

Farewell to Constantinople — Europe and the East compared — The departure, 
Smyrna, the great mart for figs — An excursion into Asia Minor — Travelling 
equipments — Character of the hajjis — Encampment of gipsies — A youthful 
Hebe — Note, Horror of the Turks for the unclean animal" — An anecdote 

. 301—306 



CONTEXTS. 



LETTER III. 

Natural statue of Niobe— The thorn of Syria and its tradition— Approach to 
Magnesia — Hereditary residence of the family of Bey-Oglou — Character of its 
present occupant — The truth about Oriental Caravanserais — Comforts and ap- 
pliances they yield to travellers— Figaro of the Turks — The pi Haw— Morning 
scene at the departure — Playful familiarity of a solemn old Turk— Magnificent 
Prospect from Mount Sipylus. ... Page 306 — 312 

LETTER IV. 

Thje eye of the camel — Rocky sepulchres — Virtue of an old passport backed by 
impudence — Temple of Cybele — Palace of Croesus—Ancient church of Sardis — 
Return to Smyrna. . • 312—316 

LETTER V. 

Smyrna — Charms of its society — Hospitality of foreign residents — The Marina — 
— The Casino — A narrow escape from the plague — Departure of the frigate 
— American navy — A tribute of respect and gratitude — The Farewell 317 — 321 

LETTER VL 

MILAN. 

Journey through Italy — Bologna — Malibran — Parma — Nightingales of Lombardy 
— Piacenza — Austrian soldiers — The Simplon — Milan — Resemblance to Paris— 
The cathedral — Guercino's Hagar — Milanese exclusiveness • 321—326 

LETTER VII. 

LOMBARDY — AUSTRIA — THE ALPS. 

A melancholy procession — Lago Maggiore — Isola Bella — the Simplon — Meeting 
a fellow-countryman — The valley of Rhone. . . 326—331 

LETTER VIII. 

SWITZERLAND. 

La Valais — The cretins and the goitres — A Frenchman's opinion of Niagara — Lake 
Leman — Castle of Chillon — Rocks of Meillerie — Republican air — Mont Blanc — 
Geneva . . . • 331—356 

LETTER IX. 

Lake Leman— American appearance of the Genevese — Steamboat on the Rhone — 
Gibbon and Rousseau — Adventure of the lilies — Genevese jewellers — Residence 
of Voltaire — Byron's nightcap — Voltaire's walking-stick and stockings 356 — 340 

LETTER X. 

FRANCE. 

practical bathos of celebrated places — Travelling companions at the Simplon— 
Custom-house comforts — Trials of temper — Different aspects of France, Italy, 
and Switzerland — Force of politeness 341 — 345 



CONTENTS. 
LETTER XI. 

PARIS AND LONDON. 

Paris and the Parisians — Lafayette's funeral — Royal respect and gratitude — England 
Dover — English neatness and comfort— Specimen of English reserve — The 
gentleman driver fashion— A case for Mrs. Trollope. . . 345 — 550 

LETTER XII. 

First view of London — The king's birth-day — Procession of mail-coaches — Regent 
Street — Lady B , &c. . . 550 — 357 

LETTER XIII. 

THE LITERATI OP LONDON. 

Lady B The author of " Rejected Addresses" — Henry B 

Count D'O The Author of " Pelham" . . „ 358—361 

LETTER XIV. 

LONDON. 

M A dinner at Lady B 's . 361 — 368 

LETTER XV. 

Visit to a race-course — Gipsies — The Princess Victoria — Splendid appearance of 
the English nobility — A breakfast with Elia and Bridget Elia — Mystification — 
Charles Lamb's opinion of American authors . . . 369 — 374 

LETTER XVI. 

JOURNEY TO SCOTLAND. 

Immensity of London — Voyage to Leith — Society of the steam-packet— Analogy 
between Scotch and American manners — Strict observance of the Sabbath on 
board— Edinburgh . . . 374 — 57$ 

LETTER XVII. 

EDINBURGH. 

A Scotch breakfast— The Castle — Palace of Holyrood— Queen Mary — Rizzio — 
Charles the Tenth .... 378-382 

LETTER XVIII. 

A VISIT TO D CASTLE. 

Romance and Reality — Dalkeith Railway — Reception at D Castle — Com- 
parisons— D— " Policies"— Family Legends— The Warlock Pear 582—385 

LETTER XIX. 

D CASTLE. 

Sporting and its equipments— Roslin Castle, and Chapel— A cicerone 385—389 

b 



CONTEXTS. 



LETTER XX. 

EDINBURGH. 

"Christopher North" — Mr. Blackwood — The Ettrick Shepherd — Lockhart— 
•Noctes Ambrosianae' — Wordsworth —Southey — Captain Hamilton and his 
book on America ..... . 590 — 397 

LETTER XXI. 

SCOTLAND. 

Lord J Lord B Politics— The "Grey* Ball— Aberdeen— G 

Castle . • .... S98— 401 

LETTER XXII. 

Q CASTLE. 

Company there — The park — Duke of G— Personal beauty of the English 
aristocracy .... 401 — 405 

LETTER XXIII. 



-CASTLE. 



English breakfast — Salmon-fishery — Lord A— —Mr. M'Lane — Sporting 
establishment of G Castle . . . 405—409 

LETTER XXIV. 

O CASTLE. 

Scotch hospitality— Duchess* infant school — Manners of high life — The tone of 
conversation in England and America contrasted . . 410 — 414 

LETTER XXV. 

THE HIGHLANDS. 

Departure from G Castle — The Pretender — Scotch character misappre- 
hended — Observance of Sunday — Highland chieftains . 414 — 418 

LETTER XXVI. 

THE HIGHLANDS. 

Caledonian canal — Dogs — English exclusiveness — English insensibility of fine 
scenery— Flora Macdonald and the Pretender — Highland tiavelling 418 — 422 

LETTER XXVII. 

THE HIGHLANDS. 

Invaredeen — Tarbet — Cockney Tourist — Loch Lomond — Inversnaid — Rob Roy's 
Cave — Discomfiture— The birth-place of Helen Mac Gregor . 423 — 427 

LETTER XXVIII. 

Highland hut, its furniture and inmates — Highland amusement and dinner — 
• Rob Roy,' and scenery of the ' Lady of the Lake* „ 427—452 



CONTENTS. 
LETTER XXIX. 

STIRLING. 

Scottish stages — Thorough-bred setter — Scenery — Female peasantry— Mary Queen 
q£ Scots— Stirling Castle .... . 432—436 

LETTER XXX. 

Scotch scenery — A. race — Cheapness of lodgings in Edinburgh — Abbotsford — Scott 
Lord Dalhousie — Thomas Moore — Jane Porter — The grave of Scott 

436—443 

LETTER XXXI. 

Hawick— Road to Carlisle — Carlisle— Lancaster— Hall . . 443 — 447 

LETTER XXXII. 

Liverpool — American Importations — The Railway Hall — Conclusion 

448—452 

LETTER XXXIIL 
Oovent-G&rden Theatre— Brighton— Wallack. 

LETTER XXXIV. 
Ttoe Elephant and Castle— Itinerant Vendors of Cheap Wares— News- Boys— Cads. 

LETTER XXXV. 

Kenilworth— Pierce GaTeston— His Execution and Character— Associations connected with 
Kenilworth— Italian Boy— Contrast between Domestic and Wandering Maoits— Roifu of 
the Castle— Feelings excited by a Visit here— Antique Fireplace— Miss Jane Porter— The 
Historical Romance— Common Herd of Tourirts. 



PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 



LETTER I. 
PARIS. 

CHOLERA RIOTING HOTEL DIEU. 



March, 1832. 

You will see by the papers, I presume, the official accounts 
of the cholera in Paris. It seems very terrible to you, no 
doubt, at your distance from the scene, and truly it is terrible 
enough, if one could realise it any where — but no one here 
thinks of troubling himself about it ; and you might be here 
a month, and if you observed the people only, and fre- 
quented only the places of amusement and the public pro- 
menades, you might never suspect its existence. The month 
is June-like — deliciously warm and bright, and the trees 
are just in the tender green of the new buds; and the ex- 
quisite gardens of the Tuileries are thronged all day with 
thousands of the gay and idle, sitting under the trees in 
groups, and laughing and amusing themselves as if there 
was no plague in the air, though hundreds die every day ; 
; and the churches are all hung in black, with the constant 
succession of funerals, and you cross the biers and hand- 
barrows of the sick hurrying to the hospitals at every turn, 
in every quarter of the city. It is very hard to realise such 
j things, and, it would seem, very hard even to treat it 
1 seriously. I was at a masque ball at the " Theatre des 
, Varietes" a night or two since, at the celebration of the 
Mi-careme. There were some two thousand people, I 
should think, in fancy dresses ; most of them grotesque 
and satirical ; and the ball was kept up till seven m the 

B 



2 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY, 

morning, with all the extravagant gaiety and noise and 
fun with which the French people manage such matters. 
There was a cholera- waltz and a ckolera-galopade ; and 
one man, immensely tall, dressed as a personification of 
the tijv^ra, with skeleton armour and blood-shot eyes, and 
other horrible appurtenances of a walking pestilerfce. It 
was the burden of all the jokes, and all the cries of the 
hawkers, and all the conversation. And yet, probably, 
nineteen out of twenty of those present lived in the quar- 
ters most ravaged by the disease, and most of them had 
seen it face to face, and knew perfectly its deadly cha- 
racter. 

As yet, the higher classes of society have escaped. It 
seems to depend very much on the manner in which people 
live ; and the poor have been struck in every quarter, often 
at the very next door to luxury. A friend told me this 
morning, that the porter of a large and fashionable hotel in 
which he lives had been taken to the hospital ; and there 
have been one or two cases in the airy quarter of St. 
Germain. 

Several medical students have died, too, but the majority 
of these live with the narrowest economy, and in the parts 
of the city the most liable to impure effluvia. The balls go 
on still in the gay world, and I presume they would go 
on if there were only musicians enough left to make an 
orchestra, or fashionists to compose a quadrille. 

As if one plague was not enough, the city is all alive in 
the distant faubourgs with revolts. Last night the rappel 
was beat all over the city, and the National Guard called 
to arms, and marched to the Porte St. Denis and the dif- 
ferent quarters where the mobs were collected. The occa- 
sion of the disturbance is singular enough. It has been 
discovered, as you will see by the papers, that a great num- 
ber of people have been poisoned at the wine-shops. Men 
have been detected, with what object Heaven only knows, 
in putting arsenic and other poisons into the cups and even 
into the buckets of the water-carriers at the fountains. 
Several of these empoisonneurs have been taken from the 
officers of justice, and literally torn limb from limb, in the 
streets. Two were drowned yesterday by the mob in the 
Seine, at the Pont-Neuf. It is believed bv manv of the 







3?zs-yC ^A^s^cy. J%z& C/L^z^y oya> 



za& 



PARIS. 3 

common people that this is done by the government, and 
the opinion prevails sufficiently to produce very serious 
disturbances. They suppose there is no cholera except 
such as is produced by poison ; and the Hotel Dieu and 
the other hospitals are besieged daily by the infuriated 
mob, who swear vengeance against the government for all 
the mortality they witness. 

I have just returned from a visit to the Hotel Dieu — the 
hospital for the cholera. I had previously made several 

tempts to gain admission, in vain, but yesterday I fell in. 
ortunately, with an English physician, who told me I 
could pass with a doctor's diploma, which he offered to 
borrow for me of some medical friend. He called by ap- 
pointment at seven this morning, to fulfil his promise. 

It was like one of our loveliest mornings in June — an 
inspiriting, sunny, balmy day, all softness and beauty, and 
we crossed the Tuileries by one of its superb avenues, and 
kept down the bank of the river to the island. With the 
errand on which we were bound in our minds, it was 
impossible not to be struck very forcibly with our own 
exquisite enjoyment of life. I am sure I never felt my 
veins fuller of the pleasure of health and motion, and I 
never saw a day when every thing about me seemed better 
worth living for. The superb palace of the Louvre, with 
its long facade of nearly half a mile, lay in the mellowest 
sunshine on our left, — the lively river, covered with boats, 
and spanned with its magnificent and crowded bridges on 
our right, — the view of the island with its massive old 
structures below, — and the fine old gray towers of the 
church of Notre Dame, rising dark and gloomy in the 
distance — it was difficult to realise any thing but life and 
pleasure. That under those very towers which added so 
much to the beauty of the scene, there lay a thousand and 
more of poor wretches dying of a plague, was a thought my 
mind would not retain a moment. 

A half hours walk brought us to the Place Notre Dame, 
on one side of which, next this celebrated church, stands 
the Hospital. My friend entered, leaving me to wait till 
he had found an acquaintance, of whom he could borrow 
a diploma. A hearse was standing at the door of the 
church, and I went in for a moment. A few mourners, 

B 2 



4 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

^with the appearance of extreme poverty, were kneeling 
round a coffin at one of the side-altars, and a solitary priest, 
with an attendant boy, was mumbling the prayers for the 
dead As I came out, another hearse drove up, with a 
rough coffin scantily covered with a pall, and followed by 
one poor old man. They hurried in ; and, as my friend 
had not yet appeared, I strolled round the square. Fifteen 
or twenty water-carriers were filling their buckets a\ ,ne 
fountain opposite, singing and laughing, and at tne .same 
moment four different litters crossed towards the Hospnal, 
each with its two or three followers, women and cYAaren 
or relatives of the sick, accompanying them to the door, 
where they parted from them, most probably, for ever. The 
litters were set down a moment before ascending the staps, 
the crowd pressed around and lifted the coarse curtains, 
farewells were exchanged, and the sick alone passed in. 
I did not see any great demonstration of feeling in the 
particular cases that were before me, but I can conceive, in 
the almost deadly certainty of this disease, that these hasty 
partings at the door of the Hospital might often be scenes 
of unsurpassed suffering and distress. 

I waited, perhaps, ten minutes more for my friend. In 
the whole time that I had been there, ten litters, bearing 
the sick, had entered the Hotel Dieu. As I exhibited the 
borrowed diploma, the eleventh arrived, and with it a 
young man, whose violent and uncontrolled grief worked 
so far on the soldier at the door, that he allowed him to 
pass. I followed the bearers up to the ward, interested 
exceedingly to see the patient, and desirous to observe the 
first treatment and manner of reception. They wound 
slowly up the staircase to the upper story, and entered the 
female department — a long, low room, containing nearly a 
hundred beds, placed in alleys scarce two feet from each 
other : nearly all were occupied ; and those which were 
empty, my friend told me, were vacated by deaths yester* 
day. They set down the litter by the side of a narrow cot 
with coarse but clean sheets, and a Sceur dc Ckaritc, with 
a white cap and a cross at her girdle, came and took ofF the 
canopy. A young woman of apparently twenty- five was 
beneath, absolutely convulsed with agony. Her eyes were 
started from the sockets, her mouth foamed, and her face 



PARIS. 5 

was of a frightful, livid purple. I never saw so horrible a 
sight. She had been taken in perfect health only three 
hours before, but her features looked to me marked with a 
year of pain. The first attempt to lift her produced violent 
vomiting, and I thought she must die instantly. They 
covered her up in bed, and, leaving the man who came 
with her hanging over her with the moan of one deprived 
of his senses, they went to receive others who were entering- 
in the same manner. I inquired of my friend, how soon 
she would be attended to. He said, " Possibly in an 
hour, as the physician was just commencing his rounds/* 
An hour after, I passed the bed of this poor woman, 
and she had not yet been visited. Her husband 
answered my question with a choking voice and a flood 
of tears. 

I passed down the ward, and found nineteen or twenty* 
in the last agonies of death. They lay quite still, and 
seemed benumbed. I felt the limbs of several, and found 
them quite cold. The stomach only had a little warmth* 
Now and then a half groan escaped those who seemed the 
strongest, but with the exception of the universally open 
mouth and upturned ghastly eye, there were no signs of 
much suffering. I found two, who must have been dead 
half an hour, undiscovered by the attendants. One of them 
was an old woman, quite grey, with a very bad expression 
of face, who was perfectly cold — lips, limbs, body and all. 
The other was younger, and seemed to have died in pain. 
Her eyes looked as if they had been forced half out of the 
sockets, and her skin was of the most livid and deathly 
purple. The woman in the next bed told me she had died 
since the Sceur de Charite had been there. It is horrible 
to think how these poor creatures may suffer in the very 
midst of the provisions that are made professedly for their 
relief. I asked why a simple prescription of treatment 
might not be drawn up by the physician, and administered 
hy the numerous medical students who were in Paris, that 
as few as possible might suffer from delay. " Because," 
said my companion, " the chief physicians must do every 
thing personally to study the complaint/' And so, I verily 
believe, more human lives are sacrificed in waiting for 
experiments than ever will be saved by the results. My 



f) PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

Hood boiled from the beginning to the end of this melan- 
choly visit. 

I wandered about alone among the beds till my heart 
was sick, and I could bear it no longer, and then rejoined 
my friend, who was in the train of one of the physicians 
making the rounds. One would think a dying person 
should be treated with kindness. I never saw a rougher 
or more heartless manner than that of the celebrated Dr. 
— - — at the bed-sides of these poor creatures. A harsh 
question, a rude pulling open of the mouth to ]ook at the 
tongue, a sentence or two of unsuppressed comment to the 
students on the progress of the disease, and the train passed 
on. If discouragement and despair are not medicines, I 
should think the visits of such physicians were of little 
avail. The wretched sufferers turned away their heads 
after he had gone, in every instance that I saw, with an 
expression of visibly increased distress. Several of them 
refused to answer his questions altogether. 

On reaching the bottom of the Salle St. Monique, one 
of the male wards, I heard loud voices and laughter. I 
had heard much more groaning and complaining in passing 
among the men, and the horrible discordance struck me as 
something infernal. I* proceeded from one of the sides ta 
which the patients had been removed who were recovering. 
The most successful treatment had been found to be punch 
— very strong, with but little acid ; and, being permitted 
to drink as much as they would, they had become par- 
tially intoxicated. It was a fiendish sight, positively. They 
were sitting up, and reaching from one bed to the other r 
and with their still pallid faces and blue lips, and the 
hospital dress of white, they looked like so many carousing 
corpses. I turned away from them in horror. 

I was stopped in the door-way by a litter entering with 
a sick woman. They set her down in the main passage 
between the beds, and left her a moment to find a place 
for her. She seemed to have an interval of pain, and rose 
up one hand and looked about her very earnestly. I fol- 
lowed the direction of her eyes, and could easily imagine 
her sensations. Twenty or thirty death-like faces were 
turned towards her from the different beds, and the groans 
of the dying and the distressed came from every side, and 



VILLA FRANCA. 7 

die was without a friend whom she knew : sick of a mortal 
disease, and abandoned to the mercy of those whose kind- 
ness is mercenary and habitual, and, of course, without sym- 
pathy or feeling. Was it not enough alone, if she had 
been far less ill, to embitter the very fountains of life, and 
make her almost wish to die ? She sank down upon the 
litter again, and drew her shawl over her head. I had seen 
enough of suffering; and I left the place. 

On reaching the lower staircase, my friend proposed to 
me to look into the dead-room. We descended to a large 
dark apartment below the street level, lighted by a lamp 
fixed to the wall. Sixty or seventy bodies lay on the floor, 
some of them quite uncovered, and some wrapped in mats. 
I could not see distinctly enough by the dim light to judge 
of their discolouration. They appeared mostly old and 
emaciated. 

I cannot describe the sensation of relief with which I 
breathed the free air once more. I had no fear of the 
cholera, but the suffering and misery I had seen oppressed 
and half smothered me. Every one who has walked 
through a hospital will remember how natural it is to 
subdue the breath, and close the nostrils to the smells of 
medicine and the close air. The fact too, that the question 
of contagion is still disputed, though I fully believe the 
cholera not to be contagious, might have had some effect. 
My breast heaved, however, as if a weight had risen from 
my lungs, and I walked home to my breakfast, blessing 
God for health with undissembled gratitude. 



LETTER II. 
VILLA FRANCA. 



May, 1832. 



We returned in time to receive a letter from the American 
Consul, confirming the orders of the commissary, but ad- 
vising us to return to Antibes, and sail thence from Villa 
Franca, a lazaretto in the neighbourhood of Nice, whence 



8 



PEXCILLINGS BY THE WAY, 



?v r e could enter Italy, after seven days quarantine! By 
this time several travelling carriages bad collected, and all, 
profiting by our experience, turned back together. We 
are now at the " Golden Eagle M deliberating. Some have 
determined to give up their object altogether, but the rest 
of us sail to-morrow morning in a fishing-boat for the 
lazaretto. 

There were but eight of the twenty or thirty travellers 
stopped at the bridge of St. Laurent, who thought it worth 
while to persevere. We are all here in this pest-house at 
present^ and a motley mixture of nations it is. There are 
two young Sicilians returning from college to Messina ; a 
Belgian lad of seventeen, just started on his travels j two 
aristocratic young Frenchmen, very elegant and very 
ignorant of the world, running down to Italy, to avoid the 
cholera ; a middle-aged surgeon in the British navy, 
very cool, and very gentlemanly ; a vulgar Marseilles 
shopkeeper ; and myself. I thought we should never get 
away from Antibes. After spending several hours in dis- 
puting with the boatmen, who took advantage of our 
situation to demand more money for the voyage than they 
could make by their trade in a year, we embarked. 

We hoisted the fisherman's lattine sail, and put out of 
the little harbour in very bad temper. The wind was fair, 
and we ran along the shore for a couple of hours, till we 
came to Nice, where we were to stop for permission to go 
to the lazaretto. We were hailed off the mole with a 
trumpet, and suffered to pass. Doubling a little point, 
half a mile farther on, we ran into the bay of Villa Franca, 
a handful of houses, at the base of an amphitheatre of 
mountains. A little round tower stood in the centre of the 
harbour, built upon a rock, and connected with the town 
by a draw-bridge, and we were landed at a staircase outside, 
by which we mounted to show our papers U> the health- 
officer. The interior was a little circular yard separated 
from an office on the town side by an iron grating, and 
looking out on the sea bv two embrasures for cannon. Two 
strips of water and the sky above were our whole prospect 
for the hour that we waited here. The cause of his delay 
was presently explained by clouds of smoke issuing from 
the interior. The tower filled, and a more nauseating 



VILLA FRANCA. 9 

odour I never inhaled. We were near suffocating with the 
intolerable smell and the quantity of smoke deemed neces- 
sary to secure his Majesty's officer against contagion. 

A cautious-looking old gentleman with gray hair emerged 
at last from the smoke with a long cane-pole in his hand, 
and, coughing at every syllable, requested us to insert our 
passports in the split at the extremity which he thrust 
through the grate. This being done, we asked him for 
bread. We had breakfasted at seven, and it was now sun- 
down — near twelve hours' fast. Several of my companions 
had been sea-sick with the swell of the Mediterranean in 
coming from Antibes, and all were faint with hunger and 
exhaustion. For myself, the villanous smell of our purifi- 
cation had made me sick, and I had no appetite ; but the 
rest ate very voraciously of a loaf of coarse bread, which 
was extended to us with a pair of tongs and two pieces of 
paper. 

After reading our passports, the magistrate informed us 
that he had no orders to admit us to the lazaretto, and we 
must lie in our boat till he could send a messenger to Nice 
with our passports, and obtain permission. We opened upon 
him, however, with such a flood of remonstrance, and with 
such an emphasis from hunger and fatigue, that he consented 
to admit us temporarily on his own responsibility, and gave 
the boatmen orders to row back to a long low stone building 
we had observed at one of the corners of the entrance to 
the harbour. 

He was there before us ; and as we mounted the stone 
ladder he pointed through the bars of a large inner gate to 
a single chamber separated from the rest of the building, 
and promising to send us something to eat in the course ot 
the evening, left us to take possession. Our position was 
desolate enough. The building was new, and the plaster 
still soft and wet. There was not an article of furniture 
in the chamber, and but a single window : the floor was of 
brick, and the air as damp within as a cellar. The al- 
ternative was to remain out of doors, in the small yard 
walled up thirty feet on three sides, and washed by the sea 
on the other; and here, on a long block of granite, the 
softest thing I could find, I determined to make an alfresco 
night of it. 



10 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

Bread, cheese, wine, and cold meat, seethed, Italian 
fashion, in nauseous oil, arrived about nine o'clock; and 
by the light of a candle standing in a boot we sat around 
on the brick floor, and supped very merrily. Hunger had 
brought even our two French exquisites to their fare, and 
they ate heartily. The navy surgeon had seen service, and 
had no qualms -, the Sicilians were from a German uni- 
versity, and were not delicate; the Marseilles tape-seller 
knew apparently no better, and we should have been less 
•contented with a better meal. It was superfluous to 
abuse it. 

A steep precipice hangs right over the lazaretto, and the 
horn of the half-moon was just dipping below it as I 
stretched myself to sleep. With a folded ccat under my 
hip, and a carpet-bag for a pillow, I soon fell asleep, and 
slept soundly till sun-rise. My companions had chosen 
shelter, but all were happy to be early risers. We mounted 
our high wall upon the sea, and promenaded till the sun 
was broadly up ; and the breeze from the Mediterranean 
sharpened our appetites; and then, finishing the relics of 
our supper, we waited with what patience we might the 
arrival of our breakfast. 

The magistrate arrived at twelve, yesterday, with a 
commissary from Villa Franca, who is to be our victualler 
during the quarantine. He has enlarged our limits by a 
stone staircase and an immense chamber, on condition that 
we pay for an extra guard, in the shape of a Sardinian 
soldier, who is to sleep in our room and eat at our table. 
By the way, we have a table, and four rough benches, and 
these with three single mattresses are all the furniture we 
can procure. We are compelled to sleep across the latter, 
of course, to give every one his share. 

We have come down very contentedly to our situation, 
and I have been exceedingly amused at the facility with 
which eight such different tempers can amalgamate upon 
compulsion. Our small quarters bring us in contact con- 
tinually, and we harmonise like schoolboys. At this 
moment the Marseilles trader and the two Frenchmen are 
throwing stones at something that is floating out with the 
tide ; the surgeon has dropped his Italian grammar to 
decide upon the best shot ; the Belgian is fishing off the 



NICE. II 

wall with a pin hook and a hit of cheese; and the two 
Sicilians are talking lingua Franca at the top of their 
voices to Carolina, the guardian's daughter, who stands 
j coqueting on the pier just outside the limits. I have got 
out my books and portfolio, and taken possession of the 
broad stair ; and, depending on the courtesy of my com- 
panions to jump over me and my papers when they go up 
and down, I sit here most of the day laughing at the fun 
below, and writing or reading alternately. The climate is 
too delicious for discontent. Every breath is a pleasure. 
The hills of the amphitheatre opposite us are covered with 
olive, lemon, and orange trees ; and in the evening, from 
the time the land-breeze commences to blow offshore, until 
ten or eleven, the air is impregnated with the delicate 
perfume of the orange-blossom, than which nothing could 
be more grateful. Nice is called the hospital of Europe ; 
and truly, under this divine sky, and with the inspiring 
vitality and softness of the air, and all that nature can lavish 
of luxuriance and variety upon the hills, it is the place, if 
there is one in the world, where the drooping spirit of the 
invalid must revive and renew. At this moment the sun 
has crept from the peak of the highest mountain across the 
bay, and we shall scent presently the spicy wind from the 
shore. I close my book to go out upon the wall, which I 
see the surgeon has mounted already with the same object,, 
to catch the first breath that blows sea- ward. 



LETTER III. 
NICE. 

ITALIAN SUMMER-MORNING NEW ARRIVALS — COMPANIONS 

DEPARTURE FROM THE LAZARETTO, &C. 

It is Sunday, and an Italian summer morning. I do not 
think my eyes ever woke upon so lovely a day. The long. 
lazy swell comes in from the Mediterranean as smooth as 
glass ; the sails of a beautiful yacht belonging to an English 
nobleman at Nice, and lying becalmed just now in the bay, 
are hanging motionless about the masts ; the sky is without 



12 PENCILLING^ BY THE WAY. 

a speck ; and the air just seems to me to steep every nerve 
and fibre of the frame with repose and pleasure. Now and 
then, in America, I have felt a June morning that approached 
it, but never the degree, the fulness, the sunny softness of 
this exquisite clime. It tranquillises the mind as well as 
the body. You cannot resist feeling content and genial. 
We are all out of doors, and my companions have brought 
down their mattresses, and are lying along in the shade of 
the east wall, talking quietly and pleasantly ; the usual 
sounds of the workmen on the quays of the town are still ; 
our harbour-guard lies asleep in his boat, and the yellow 
flag of the lazaretto clings to the staff; every thing about 
us breathes tranquillity. Prisoner as I am, I would not 

stir willingly to-day. 

* # * # * * 

We have had two new arrivals this morning — a boat 
from Antibes with a company of players bound for the 
theatre at Milan, and two French deserters from the regi- 
ment at Toulon, who escaped in a leaky boat, and have 
made this long voyage along the coast, to get into Italy. 
They knew nothing of the quarantine, and were very much 
surprised at their arrest. They will probably be delivered 
up to the French consul. The new comers are all put 
together in the large chamber next us, and we have been 
talking with them through the grate. His majesty of 
Sardinia is not spared in their voluble denunciations. 

Our imprisonment is getting to be a little tedious. We 
lengthen our breakfasts and dinners, go to sleep early and 
get up late ; but a lazaretto is a dull place after all. We 
have no books, except dictionaries and grammars, and I am 
on my last sheet of paper. What I shall do the two re- 
maining days, I cannot divine. Our meals were amusing 
for a while. We have but three knives and four glasses ; 
and the Belgian having cut his plate in two on the first 
day, has eaten since from the wash-bowl. The salt is in a 
brown paper, the vinegar in a shell, and the meats, to be 
kept warm during their passage by water, are brought in 
the black utensils in which they are cooked. Our table- 
cloth appeared to day of all the colours of the rainbow. We 
sat down to breakfast with a general cry of horror. Still, 
•with youth and good spirits, we manage to be more con- 



THE LAZARETTO. IS 

tented than one would expect, and our lively discussions of 
the spot on the quay where the table shall be laid, and the 
noise of our dinners en plein aw, would convince a spectator 
that we were a very merry and sufficiently happy company* 
I like my companions, on the whole, very much. The 
surgeon has been in Canada and the west of New York, 
and we have travelled the same routes, and made in several 
instances the same acquaintances. He has been in almost 
every part of the world also, and his descriptions are very 
graphic and sensible. The Belgian talks of his new king 
Leopold, — the Sicilians, of the German universities ; and 
when I have exhausted all they can tell me, I turn to our 
Parisians, whom I find I have met all winter, without 
noticing them, at the parties, and we discuss the belles and 
the different members of the beau monde with the touching- 
air and tone of exiles from Paradise. In a case of desperate 
ennui, wearied with studying and talking, the sea-wall is 
a delightful lounge, and the blue Mediterranean plays the 
witch to the indolent fancy, and beguiles it well. I have 
never seen such a beautiful sheet of water. The colour is 
peculiarly rich and clear, like an intensely blue sky heaving 
into waves. I do not find the often-repeated description of 

its loveliness at all exaggerated. 

# # * * # * 

Our seven days expire to-morrow, and we are preparing 
to eat our last dinner in the lazaretto with great glee. A 
temporary table is already laid upon the quay — two strips 
of board raised upon some ingenious contrivance, 1 cannot 
well say what, and covered with all the private and public 
napkins that retained any portion of their maiden whiteness. 
Our knives are reduced to two, one having disappeared 
unaccountably; but the deficiency is partially remedied — the 
surgeon has whittled a pine-knot which floated in upon the 
tide into a distant imitation, and one of the company has 
produced a delicate dagger that looks very like a keepsake 
from a lady, and by the reluctant manner in which it was 
produced, the profanation cost his sentiment an effort. Its 
white handle and silver sheath lie across a plate abridged of 
its proportions by a very formidable segment. There was 
no disguising the poverty of the brown paper that contains 
the salt. It was too necessary to be made an c< aside," and 



14 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

was placed upon the centre of the table. I fear there has 
been more fuss in the preparation than we shall feel in eat- 
ing the dinner when it arrives. The Belgian stands on the 
mole watching all the boats from town ; but they pass oft 
down the harbour one after another, and we are destined to 
keep our appetites to a late hour. Their detestable .cooking 
needs the " sauce of hunger." 

The Belgian's hat waves in the air, and the commissary's 
boat must be in sight As we get off* at six o'clock to- 
morrow morning, my portfolio shuts till I find another rest- 
ing-place — probably Genoa. 

****** 

The health-magistrate arrived at an early hour on the 
morning of our departure from the lazaretto of Villa Franca. 
He was accompanied by a physician, who was to direct the 
fumigation. The iron pot was placed in the centre of the 
chamber; our clothes were spread out upon the beds, and 
the windows shut. The chlorine soon filled the room, and 
its detestable odour became so intolerable that we forced 
the door and rushed past the sentinel into the open air, 
nearly suffocated. This farce over, we were suffered to 
embark, and, rounding the point, put into Nice. 

The Mediterranean curves gracefully into the crescented 
shore of this lovely bay, and the high hills loom away from 
the skirts of the town in one unbroken slope of cultivation 
to the top. Large handsome buildings face you on the long 
quay as you approach, and white chimneys and half -con 
cealed fronts of country-houses and suburban villas appear 
through the olives and orange-trees with which the whole 
amphitheatre is covered. A painter would not mingle a 
landscape more picturesquely. We landed amid a crowd of 
half-naked idlers, and were soon at an hotel, where we 
ordered the best breakfast the town would afford, and sat 
down once more to clean cloths and un repulsive food. 

As we rose from breakfast, a note edged with black, and 
sealed and enveloped with considerable circumstance, was 
put into my hand by the master of the hotel It was an 
invitation from the Governor to attend a funeral-service to 
be performed in the cathedral that day at ten o'clock, for 
the defunct queen-mother, Maria-Theresa, Archduchess of 
•Austria. Wondering not a little how I came by the honour, 



XICE. IS 

I dressed and joined the crowd flocking from all parts of 
the town to see the ceremony. The central door was 
guarded by a file of Sardinian soldiers, and, presenting my 
invitation to the officer on duty,, I was handed over to the 
master of ceremonies, and shown to an excellent seat in 
the centre of the church. The windows were darkened, 
and the candles of the altar not yet lit ; and by the indis- 
tinct light that came in through the door I could distinguish 
nothing clearly. A little silver bell tinkled presently from 
one of the side chapels, and boys dressed in white appeared 
with long tapers, and the edifice was soon splendidly illu- 
minated. I found myself in the midst of a crowd of four 
or five hundred ladies, all in deep mourning. The church 
was hung from the floor to the roof in black cloth, orna- 
mented gorgeously with silver ; and under the large dome 
which occupied half the ceiling was raised a pyramidal 
altar, with tripods supporting chalices for incense at the 
four corners ; a walk round the lower base for the priests, 
and something in the centre, surrounded with a blaze of 
light representing figures weeping over a tomb. The organ 
commenced pealing ; there was a single beat on the drum, 
and a procession entered. It was composed of the nobility 
of Nice, and the military and civil officers, all in uniform 
and court dresses. The gold and silver flashing in the 
light ; the tall plumes of the Sardinian soldiery below ; the 
solemn music, and the moving of the censers from the four 
corners of the altar produced a very impressive effect. As 
soon as the procession had quite entered, the fire was kind- 
led in the four chalices ; and as the white smoke rolled up 
to the roof, an anthem commenced with the full power 
of the organ. The singing was admirable, and there 
was one female voice in the choir of singular power and 
sweetness. 

The remainder of the service was the usual mummery of 
the Catholic Church, and I amused myself with observing 
the people about me. It was little like a scene of mourning. 
The officers gradually edged in between the seats, and every 
woman of the Isast pretensions to prettiness was engaged in 
any thing but her prayers for the soul of the defunct Arch- 
duchess. Some of the very young girls were pretty, and 
the women of thirty-five or forty apparently were fine-look- 



16 PENCJLLINGS BY THE WAY. 

ing ; but except a decided air of style and rank, the fairly 
grown-up belles seemed to me very unattractive. 

I saw little else in Nice to interest me. I wandered 
about with my friend the surgeon, laughing at the ridi- 
culous figures and villanous uniforms of the Sardinian in- 
fantry, and repelling the beggars who radiated to us from 
every corner ; and having traversed the terrace of a mile on 
the tops of the houses next the sea, unravelled all the lanes 
of the old town, and admired all the splendour of the new, 
we dined and got early to bed, anxious to sleep once more 
between sheets, and prepare for the early start of the fol- 
lowing morning. 

***** * 

We were on the road to Genoa with the first grey of the 
dawn — the surgeon, a French officer, and myself, the three 
passengers of a courier barouche. We were climbing up 
mountains, and sliding down with locked wheels for several 
hours by a road edging on precipices and overhung by 
tremendous rocks ; and descending at last to the sea level, 
we entered Mentone, a town of the little Principality of 
Monaco. Having paid our twenty sous tribute to this prince 
of a territory not larger than a Kentucky farm, we were 
suffered to cross his borders once more into Sardinia, having 
run through a whole state in less than half an hour. 

It is impossible to conceive a route of more grandeur than 

this famous road along the Mediterranean from Nice to 

Genoa. It is near a hundred and fifty miles, over the edges 

of mountains bordering the sea for the whole distance. The 

road is cut into the sides of the precipice often hundreds of 

feet perpendicular above the surf, descending sometimes 

into the ravines formed by the numerous rivers that cut 

iheir way to the sea, and mounting immediately again to 

ihe loftiest summits. It is a dizzy business from beginning 

to end. There is no parapet usually, and there are thousands 

of places where half a shy by a timid horse would drop you 

at once some hundred fathoms upon rocks met by the spray 

of every sea that breaks upon the shore. 

****** 



FLORENCE. 17 

LETTER IV. 
FLORENCE. 

flORENTINE PECULIARITIES — SOCIETY BALLS — DUCAL ENTER- 
TAINMENTS PRIVILEGE OF STRANGERS FAMILIES OF HIGH 

RANK THE EXCLUSIVES SOIREES PARTIES OF A RICH BANKER 

— PEASANT BEAUTY A CONTENTED MARRIED LADY — HUSBANDS, 

CAVALIERS AND WIVES PERSONAL MANNERS HABITS OF 

SOCIETY, &C. 

JANUARY, 1833. 

I am about starting on my second visit to Rome, after 
having passed nearly three months in Florence. As I have 
seen most of the society of this gayest and fairest of the 
Italian cities, it may not be uninteresting to depart a little 
from the traveller's routine, by sketching a feature or two. 

Florence is a resort for strangers from every part of the 
world. The gay society is a mixture of all nations, of 
whom one-third may be Florentine, one-third English, and 
the remaining part equally divided between Russians,, 
Germans, French, Poles, and Americans. The English 
entertain a great deal, and give most of the balls and 
dinner-parties. The Florentines seldom trouble themselves 
to give parties, but are always at home for visits in the 
prima sera, (from seven till nine,) and in their box at the 
opera. They go, without scruple, to all the strangers' balls, 
considering courtesy repaid, perhaps, by the weekly recep- 
tion of the Grand Duke and a weekly ball at the club- 
house of young Italian nobles. 

The ducal entertainments occur every Tuesday, and are 
the most splendid, of course. The foreign ministers present 
all of their countrymsin who have been presented at their 
own courts, and the company is necessarily more select than 
elsewhere. The Florentines who go to court are about 
seven hundred, of whom half are invited on each week — 
strangers, when once presented, having the double privilege 
of coming uninvited to all. There are several Italian fami- 
lies, of the highest rank, who are seen only here ; but, 
with the single exception of one unmarried girl of un- 
common beauty, who bears a name celebrated in Italian 

c 



18 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

history, they are no loss to general society. Among tie 
foreigners of rank, are three or four German princes, who 
play high and waltz well, and are remarkable for nothing 
else ; half a dozen star-wearing dukes, counts, and mar- 
quises, of all nations and in any quantity ; and a few 
English noblemen and noble ladies — only the latter rration 
showing their blood at all in their features and bearing. 

The most exclusive society is that of the Prince M > 

whose splendid palace is shut entirely against the English, 
and difficult of access to all. He makes a single exception 
in favour of a descendant of the Talbots, a lady whose 
beauty might be an apology for a much graver departure 
from rule. He has given two grand entertainments since 
the carnival commenced, to which nothing was wanting but 
people to enjoy them. The immense rooms were flooded 
with light, the music was the best that Florence could 
give, the supper might have supped an army — stars and 
red ribbons entered with every fresh comer, but it looked 
like a tc banquet-hall deserted." Some thirty ladies, and as 
many men, were all that Florence contained worthy of the 
society of the ex-king. A kinder man in his manner, how- 
ever, or apparently a more affectionate husband and father, 
I never saw. He opened the dance by waltzing with the 
young princess, his daughter, a lovely girl of fourteen, of 
whom he seems fond to excess, and he was quite the gayest 
person in the company till the ball was over. The ex- 
queen sat on a divan, with her ladies of honour about her, 
following her husband with her eyes, and enjoying his 
gaiety with the most childish good-humour. 

The Saturday evening soirees at Prince P 's (a bro- 
ther of the hero) are perhaps as agreeable as any in Flo- 
rence. He has several grown-up sons and daughters mar- 
ried, and, with a very sumptuous palace and great liberality 
of style, he has made his parties more than usually valued. 
His eldest daughter is the leader of the fashion, and his 
second is the " cynosure of all eyes." The old prince is a 
tall, bent, venerable man, with snow-white hair, and very 
peculiarly marked features. He is fond of speaking English, 
c'.nd professess a great affection for America. 

Then there are the soirees of the rich banker, F , 

^vhich, as they are subservient to business, assemble all 



CAVALIERE SERVENTE. 19 

ranks on the common pretensions of interest. At the last, 
I saw, among other curiosities, a young girl of eighteen 
from one of the more common families of Florence — a fine 
specimen of the peasant beauty of Italy. Her heavily 
moulded figure, hands, and feet, were quite forgiven when 
you looked at her dark, deep, indolent eye, and glow- 
ing skin, and strongly-lined mouth and forehead. The 
society was evidently new to her, but she had a manner 
quite beyond being astonished. It was the kind of 
animal dignity so universal in the lower dasses of this 
country. 

One gains little by his opportunities of meeting Italian 
ladies in society. The cavaliere servente flourishes still, as 
in the days of Beppo, and it is to him only that the lady 
condescends to talk.- There is a delicate, refined-looking 
little marchioness here, who is remarkable as being the 
only known Italian lady without a cavalier. They tell 
you, with an amused smile, that " she is content with her 
husband." It really seems to be a business of real love 
between the lady of Italy and her cavalier; naturally 
enough too — for her parents marry her without consulting 
her at all, and she selects a friend afterwards, as ladies in 
other countries select a lover, who is to end in a husband f 
The married couple are never seen together by any accident 
and the lady and her cavalier never apart. The latter i 
always invited with her, as a matter of course, and the hus- 
band, if there is room, or if he is not forgotten. She is 
insulted if asked without her cavalier, but is quite indifferent 
whether her husband goes with her or not. These are 
points really settled in the policy of society, and the rights 
of the cavalier are specified in the marriage-contracts. I 
had thought, until I came to Italy, that such things were 
either a romance, or customs of an age gone by. 

I like very much the personal manners of the Italians. 
They are mild and courteous to the farthest extent of looks 
and words. They do not entertain, it is true, but their 
great dim rooms are free to you whenever you can find 
them at home, and you are at liberty to join the gossiping 
circle around the lady of the house, or sit at the table and 
read, or be silent unquestioned. You are let alone, if you 
seem to choose it, and it is neither commented on nor 

c 2 



20 PENCILL1NGS BY THE WAY. 

thought uncivil, — and this I take to be a grand excellence 
in manners. 

The society is dissolute, I think, almost without an 
exception. The English fall into its habits, with the dif- 
ference that they do not conceal it so well, and have the 
appearance of knowing it is wrong — which the Italians have 
not. The latter are very much shocked at the want of pro- 
priety in the management of the English. To suffer the 
particulars of an intrigue to get about is a worse sin, in 
their eyes, than any violation of the commandments. It is 
scarce possible for an American to conceive the universal 
corruption of a society like this of Florence, though, if he 
were not told of it, he would think it all that was delicate 
arid attractive. There are external features in which the 
society of our own country is far less scrupulous and proper. 



LETTER V. 

SIENNA P0GGI0B0NSI B0NC0NVENT0 -— ENCOURAGEMENT OF 

FRENCH ARTISTS BY THEIR GOVERNMENT ACQUAPEN DENTE 

POOR BEGGAR, THE ORIGINAL OF A SKETCH BY COLE BOLSENA 

VOLSCINIUM SCENERY CURIOUS STATE OF THE CHESTNUT 

WOODS, 

Sienna. — A day and a half on my journey to Rome. With 
a party of four nations inside, and two strangers, probably 
Frenchmen, in the cabriolet, we have jogged on at some 
three miles in the hour, enjoying the lovely scenery of 
these lower Apennines at our leisure. We slept last night 
at Poggiobonsi, a little village on a hill-side, and arrived 
at Sienna for our mid-day rest. I pencil this note after an 
hour's ramble over the city, visiting once more the cathe- 
dral, with its encrusted marbles and naked graces, and the 
three shell-shaped square in the centre of the city, at the 
rim of which the eight principal streets terminate. There 
is a fountain in the midst, surrounded with bassi relievi 
much disfigured. It was mentioned by Dante. The 
streets were deserted, it being Sunday, and all the people 
at the Corso, to see the racing of horses without riders. 



Bonconvento. — We sit, with the remains of a traveller's- 



BONCONVENTO ACQUAPENDENTE. 2 1 

supper on the table — six very social companions, your 
cabriolet friends are two French artists on their way to 
study at Rome. They are both pensioners of the govern- 
ment, each having gained the annual prize at the Academy 
in his separate branch of art, which entitles him to five 
years' support in Italy. They are full of enthusiasm, and 
converse with all the amusing vivacity of their nation. 
The Academy of France send out in this manner five young 
men annually, who have gained the prizes for painting, 
sculpture, architecture, music, and engraving. 

This is the place where Henry the Seventh was poisoned 
by a monk, on his way to Rome. The drug was given to 
him in the communion-cup. The " Ave-Marie " was 
ringing when we drove into town, and I left the carriage 
and followed the crowd, in the hope of finding an old 
church, where the crime might have been committed. But 
the priest was mumbling the service in a new chapel, which 
no romance that I could summon would picture as the 

scene of a tragedy. 

****** 

Acquapendente. — While the dirty custom-house officer is 
deciphering our passports, in a hole a dog would live in 
unwillingly, I take out my pencil to mark once more the 
pleasure I have received from the exquisite scenery of this 
place. The wild rocks enclosing the little narrow valley 
below, the waterfalls, the town on its airy perch above, the 
just starting vegetation of spring, the roads lined with 
snow-drops, crocuses, and violets, have renewed, in a ten- 
fold degree, the delight with which I saw this romantic 
spot on my former journey to Rome. 

We crossed the mountain of Radicofani yesterday, in so 
thick a mist that I could not even distinguish the ruin of 
the old castle towering into the clouds above. The wild,, 
half-naked people thronged about us as before, and I gave 
another paul to the old beggar with whom I became ac- 
quainted by Mr. Cole's graphic sketch. The winter had, 
apparently, gone hard with him. He was scarce able to 
come to the carriage- window, and coughed so hollowly that 

I thought he had nearly begged his last pittance. 

* * * # *■ * 

Bolsena.— We have walked in advance of the vetturino 



22 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

along the borders of this lovely and beautiful lake till we 
are tired. Our artists have taken off their coats with the 
heat, and sit, a quarter of a mile further on, pointing in 
every direction at these unparalleled views. The water is 
as still as a mirror, with a soft mist on its face, and the 
water-fowl in thousands are diving and floating wifhin 
gun-shot of us. An afternoon in June could not be more 
summer-like, and this, to a lover of soft climate, is no 
trifling pleasure. 

A mile behind us lies the town, the seat of ancient Vol- 
scinium, the capital of the Volscians. The country about 
is one quarry of ruins, mouldering away in the moss. 
Nobody can live in health in the neighbourhood, and the 
poor pale wretches who call it a home are in melancholy 
contrast to the smiling paradise about them. Before us, in 
the bosom of the lake, lie two green islands — those which 
Pliny records to have floated in his time 5 and one of which, 
Martana, a small conical isle, was the scene of the murder 
of the queen of the Goths by her cousin Theodotus. She 
was taken there and strangled. It is difficult to imagine, 
with such a sea of sunshine around and over it, that it was 
ever any thing but a spot of delight. 

The whole neighbourhood is covered with rotten trunks 
of trees — a thing which at first surprised me in a country 
where wood is so economised. It is accounted for in the 
Prench guide-book of one of our party by the fact, that the 
chestnut woods of Bolsena are considered sacred by the 
people from their antiquity, and are never cut. The trees 
have ripened, and fallen, and rotted thus for centuries — 
one cause, perhaps, of the deadly change in the air. 

The vetturino comes lumbering up, and I must pocket 
my pencil and remount. 



LETTER VI. 

MONTEFIASCONE ANECDOTE OF THE WINE VITERBO MOUNT 

CIMINO TRADITION — VIEW OF ST. PETER'S — ENTRANCE INTO 

KOME — A STRANGER'S IMPRESSIONS OF THE CITY. 



Montefiascone. — We have stopped for the night at the 
hotel of this place, so renowned for its wine — the remnant 



A VIHTUOSO. 23 

of a bottle of which stands, at this moment, twinkling 
between me and my French companions. The ladies of 
our party have gone to bed, and left us in the room where 
sat Jean Defoucris, the merry German monk, who died of 
excess in drinking the same liquor that flashes through this 
straw-covered flask. The story is told more fully in the 
French guide-books. A prelate of Augsbourg, on a 
pilgrimage to Rome, sent forward his servant with orders 
to mark every tavern where the wine was good with the 
word est, in large letters of chalk. On arriving at this 
hotel, the monk saw the signal thrice written over the 
door — Est! Est! Est! He put up his mule, and drank 
of Montefiascone till he died. His servant wrote this 
epitaph, which is still seen in the church of St. Florian :— 

" Propter nknium est, est, 
Dominus meus mortuus est /" 

Est, Est, Est ! is the motto upon the sign of the hotel to 

this day. 

***** 

In wandering about Viterbo in search of amusement, 
while the horses were baiting, I stumbled upon the shop of 
an antiquary. After looking over his medals, Etruscan 
vases, cameos, &c, a very interesting collection, I inquired 
into the state of trade for such things in Viterbo. He was 
a cadaverous, melancholy-looking old man, with his pockets 
worn quite out with the habit of thrusting his hands into 
them, and about his mouth and eye there was the proper 
virtuoso expression of inquisitiveness and discrimination. 
He kept also a small cafe adjoining his shop, into which we 
passed as he shrugged his shoulders at my question. I 
had wondered to find a vender of costly curiosities in a town 
of such poverty, and I was not surprised at the sad fortunes 
which had followed upon his enterprise. They were a 
base herd, he said of the people, utterly ignorant of the 
value of the precious objects he had for sale, and he had 
been compelled to open a cafe and degrade himself by 
waiting on them for a contemptible craize worth of coffee, 
while his lovely antiquities lay unappreciated within. The 
old gentleman was eloquent upon his misfortunes. He had 
not been long in trade, and had collected his museum 



24 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

originally for his own amusement. He was an odd 
specimen, in a small way, of a man who was quite above 
his sphere, and suffered for his superiority. I bought a 
pretty intaglio, and bade him farewell, after an hour's 

acquaintance, with quite the feeling of a friend. 

* * & * # * 

Mount Cimino rose before us soon after leaving Viterbo, 
and we walked up most of the long and gentle ascent, 
inhaling the odour of the spicy plants for which it is famous, 
and looking out sharply for the brigands with which it is 
always infested. English carriages are constantly robbed* 
on this part of the route, of late. The robbers are met 
usually in parties of ten and twelve, and a week before we 

passed, Lady B — (the widow of an English nobleman,) 

was stopped and plundered in broad mid-day. The ex- 
cessive distress among the peasantry of these misgoverned 
states accounts for these things, and one only wonders why 
there is not even more robbing among such a starving 
population. This mountain, by the way, and the pretty 
lake below it, are spoken of in the iEneid : — " Cimini cum 
monte locum," &c. There is an ancient tradition, that in 
the crescent-shaped valley which the lake fills, there was 
formerly a city which was overwhelmed by the rise of the 
water; and certain authors state that, when the lake is 

clear, the ruins are still to be seen at the bottom. 

# # * # * 

The sun rose upon us as we reached the mountain above 
Baccano, on the sixth day of our journey ; and, by its clear 
golden flood, we saw the dome of St. Peter's, at the dis» 
tance of sixteen miles, towering amidst the Campagna in all 
its majestic beauty. We descended into the vast plain, and 
traversed its gentle undulations for two or three hours. 
With the forenoon well advanced, we turned into the valley 
of the Tiber, and saw the home of Raphael — a noble 
chateau on the side of a hill near the river ; and, in the 
little plain between, the first peach-trees we had seen, in 
full blossom. The tomb of Nero is on one side of the road, 
before crossing the Tiber, and on the other a newly-painted 
and staring restaurant, where the modern Roman cockneys 
drive for punch and ices. The bridge of Pontemolle, by 
which we passed into the immediate suburb of Rome, was 



ROME. 25 

the ancient Pons iEmilius, and here Cicero arrested the 
conspirators on their way to join Catiline in his camp. It 
was on the same bridge, too, that Constantine saw his 
famous vision, and gained his victory over the tyrant 
Maxentius. 

Two miles over the Via Flaminia, between garden-walls 
that were ornamented with sculpture and inscription in the 
time of Augustus, brought us to the Porta del Popolo. 
The square within this noble gate is modern, but very 
imposing. Two streets diverge before you, as far away as 
you can see into the heart of the city ; a magnificent 
fountain sends up its waters in the centre ; the facades of 
two handsome churches face you as you enter ; and on the 
right and left are gardens and palaces of princely splendour. 
Gay and sumptuous equipages cross it in every direction, 
driving out to the Villa Borghese, and up to the Pincian 
mount 5 the splendid troops of the Pope are on guard ; and 
the busy and stirring population of modern Rome swell out 
to its limit like the ebb and flow of the sea. All this dis- 
appoints while it impresses the stranger. He has come to 
Rome — but it was old Rome that he had pictured to his 
fancy. The Forum; the ruins of her temples; the palaces 
of her emperors ; the homes of her orators, poets, and 
patriots ; the majestic relics of the once mistress of the 
world, are the features in his anticipation. But he enters 
by a modern gate to a modern square, and pays his modem 
coin to a whiskered officer of customs; and in the place of 
a venerable Belisarius begging an obolus in classic Latin, 
he is beset by a troop of lusty and filthy lazzaroni intreating 
for a baioch in the name of the Madonna, and in effeminate 
Italian. He drives down the Corso, and reads nothing but 
French signs, and sees all the familiar wares of his own 
country exposed for sale ; and every other person on the 
pave is an Englishman with a narrow- rimmed hat and 
whalebone stick ; and within an hour, at the Dogana, where 
his baggage is turned inside out by a snuffy old man who 
speaks French, and a reception at an hotel where the porter 
addresses him in his own language, whatever it may be, he 
goes to bed under Parisian curtains, and tries to dream of 
the Rome he could not realise while awake. 



26 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 



LETTER VII. 

APPIAN WAY — TOMB OF CECILIA METELLA ALBANO — TOMB OF 

THE CURIATII ARICIA TEMPLE OF DIANA — FOUNTAIN OF 

EGERIA — LAKE OF NEMI VELLETRI PONTINE MARSHES 

CONVENT — CANAL — TERRACINA — SAN FELICE — FONDI — STORY 

OF JULIA GONZAGA CICERO'S GARDEN AND TOMB — MOLA 

MINTURNA RUINS OF AN AMPHITHEATRE AND TEMPLE 

« FALERNIAN MOUNT AND WINE THE DOCTOR OF ST. AGATHA- 
CAPUA ENTRANCE INTO NAPLES — THE QUEEN. 

Feb. 1823. 

With the intention of returning to Rome for the cere- 
monies of the holy week, I have merely passed through on 
my way to Naples. We left it the morning after our 
arrival, going by the Appian Way, to Mount Albano, 
which borders the Campagna on the south, at a distance of 
fifteen miles. This celebrated road is lined with the ruined 
tombs of the Romans. OfF at the right, some four or five 
miles from the city, rises the fortress-like tomb of Cecilia 
Metella, so exquisitely mused upon by Childe Harold. 
This, says Sismondi, with the tombs of Adrian and 
Augustus, became fortresses of banditti in the thirteenth 
century, and were taken by Brancaleone, the Bolognese 
governor of Rome, who hanged the marauders from the 
walls. It looks little like (C a woman's grave." 

We changed horses at the pretty village of Albano, and, 
on leaving it, passed an ancient mausoleum, believed to be 
the tomb of the Curiatii who fought the Horatii on the 
spot. It is a large structure, and had originally four 
pyramids on the corners, two of which only remain. 

A mile from Albano lies Aricia, in a country of the 
loveliest rural beauty. Here was the famous temple of 
Diana, and here were the lake and grove sacred to the 
** virgin huntress, and consecrated as her home by peculiar 
worship. The fountain of Egeria is here, where Numa 
communed with the nymph ; and the lake of Nemi, on the 
borders of which the temple stood, and which was called 
Dian s Mirror, {Speculum Dia?ice,) is at this day, perhaps, 
one of the sweetest gems of natural scenery in the world. 

We slept at Velletri, a pretty town of some twelve 



JOURNEY TO NAPLES. 27 

thousand inhabitants, which stands on a hill-side, leading 
down to the Pontine marshes. It was one of the grand 
days of the carnival, and the streets were full of masks, 
walking up and down in their ridiculous dresses, and com- 
mitting every sort of foolery. The next morning, by day- 
light, we were upon the Pontine marshes, the long thirty 
miles level of which we passed in an unbroken trot, one 
part of a day's journey of seventy-five miles, done by the 
same horses, at the rate of six miles in the hour ! They 
are small, compact animals, and look in good condition;, 
though they do as much habitually. 

At a distance of fifteen miles from Velletri, we passed a 
convent, which is built opposite the spot where St. Paul 
was met by his friends, on his journey from the sea-side to 
Rome. The canal upon which Horace embarked on his 
celebrated journey to Brundusium, runs parallel with the 
road for its whole distance. This marshy desert is inhabited 
by a race of as wretched beings, perhaps, as are to be found 
upon the face Qf the earth. The pestiferous miasma of the 
pools is certain destruction to health ; and the few who sre 
needed at the distant post-houses, craw] out to the road- 
side like so many victims from a pest-house, stooping with 
weakness, hollow-eyed, and apparently insensible to every 
thing. The feathered race seems exempt from its influence, 
and the quantities of game of every known description are 
incredible. The ground was alive with wild-geese 
turkeys, pigeons, plover, ducks, and numerous birds we did 
not know, as far as the eye could distinguish. The 
travelling-books caution against sleeping in the carriage 
while passing these marshes, but we found it next to im- 
possible to resist the heavy drowsiness of the air. 

At Terracina the marshes end, and the long avenue of 
elms terminates at the foot of a romantic precipice, which is 
washed by the Mediterranean. The town is most 
picturesquely built between the rocky wall and the sea. 
We dined with the hollow murmur of the surf in our ears r 
and then, presenting our passports, entered the kingdom of 
Naples. This Terracina, by the way, was the ancient 
Anxur, which Horace describes in his line — 

' Impositum late saxis eandeiitibus Anxur." 



S8 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

For twenty or thirty miles before arriving at Terracina, 
We had seen before us the headland of Circaeum, lying like 
a mountain-island off the shore. It is usually called San 
Felice, from the small town seated upon it. This was the 
ancient abode of the " daughter of the sun/' and here were 
imprisoned, according to Homer, the companions of Ulysses, 
after their metamorphoses. 

From Terracina to Fondi we followed the old Appian 
Way, a road hedged with flowering myrtles and orange- 
■ trees laden with fruit. Fondi itself is dirtier than imagi- 
nation could picture it, and the scowling men in the streets 
look like myrmidons of Fra Diavolo, their celebrated 
countryman. This town, however, was the scene of the 
romantic story of the beautiful Julia Gonzaga, and was 
destroyed by the corsair Barbarossa, who had intended to 
present the greatest beauty of Italy to the sultan. It was 
to the rocky mountains above the town that she escaped in 
her night-dress, and lay concealed till the pirate's departure. 

In leaving Fondi. we passed the ruined walls of a garden 
said to have belonged to Cicero, whose tomb is only three 
leagues distant. Night came on before we reached the 
tomb, and we were compelled to promise ourselves a pil- 
grimage to it on our return. 

We slept at Mola, and here Cicero was assassinated. The 
ruins of his country-house are still here. The town lies in 
the lap of a graceful bay, and in all Italy, it is said, there 
is no spot more favoured by nature. The mountains shelter 
it from the winds of the north; the soil produces spontane- 
ously the orange, the myrtle, the olive, delicious grapes, 
jasmine, and many odoriferous herbs. This, with its neigh- 
bourhood, was called by the great orator and statesman who 
selected it for his retreat, " the most beautiful patrimony of 
the Romans." The Mediterranean spreads out from its bosom; 
the lovely islands near Naples bound its view ; Vesuvius 
sends up its smoke and fire in the south ; and back from its 
hills stretches a country fertile and beautiful as a paradise. 
It is a place of great resort for the English and other travel- 
lers in the summer. The old palaces are turned into hotels, 
and we entered our inn through an avenue of shrubs that 

must have been planted and trimmed for a century. 
* * * # * * * 



MOLA. 29 

We left Mola before dawn, and crossed the small river 
Garigliano as the sun rose. A short distance from the 
southern bank, we found ourselves in the midst of ruins ; 
the golden beams of the sun pouring upon us through the 
arches of some once magnificent structure, whose area is 
now crossed by the road. This was the ancient Minturna, 
and the ruins are those of an amphitheatre, and a temple of 
Venus. Some say that it was in the marshes about this 
now waste city that the soldier, sent by Sylla to kill Marius, 
found the old hero, and, struck with his noble mien, fell 
with respect at his feet. 

The road soon enters a chain of hills, and the scenery 
becomes enchanting. At the left of the first ascent lies the 
Falernian Mount, whose wines are immortalised by Horace. 
It is a beautiful hill, which throws round its shoulder to 
the south, and is covered with vineyards. I dismounted 
and walked on while the horses breathed at the post-house 
of St. Agatha, and was overtaken by a good-natured look- 
ing man, mounted on a mule, of whom I made some inquiry 
respecting the modern Falernian. He said it was still the 
best wine of the neighbourhood, but was far below its 
ancient reputation, because never kept long enough to ripen. 
It is at its prime from the fifteenth to the twentieth year, 
and is usually drank the first or second. My new acquaint- 
ance, I soon found, was the physician of the two or three 
small villages nested about among the hills, and a man of 
some pretensions to learning. I was delighted with his 
frank good-humour, and a certain spice of drollery in his 
description of his patients. The peasants at work in the 
fields saluted him from any distance as he passed ; and the 
pretty contadini going to St. Agatha with their baskets on 
their heads, smiled as he nodded, calling them all by name, 
and I was rather amused than offended with the inquisitive- 
ness he manifested about my age, family, pursuits, and even 
morals. His mule stopped of its own will at the door of 
the apothecary of the small village on the summit of the hill ; 
and as the carriage came in sight the doctor invited me, 
seizing my hand with a look of friendly sincerity, to stop at 
St. Agatha on my return, to shoot, and drink Falernian 
with him for a month. The apothecary stopped the vet* 



30 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

turino at the door ; and, to the astonishment of my com- 
panions within, the doctor seized me in his arms and kissed 
me on both sides of my face with a volume of blessings and 
compliments which I had no breath, in ray surprise, to re- 
turn. I have made many friends on the road in this country of 
quick feelings, but the doctor of St. Agatha had a readiness 
of sympathy which threw all my former experience into th< 
shade. 

We dined at Capua, the city whose luxuries enervated 
.Hannibal and his soldiers — the a dives, amorosa, felix 
Capua. It is in melancholy contrast with the descriptioi 
now — its streets filthy, and its people looking the antipodes 
of luxury. The climate should be the same, as we dinec 
with open doors, and with the branch of an orange-tree 
heavy with fruit hanging in at the window, in a montl 
that with us is one of the wintriest. 

From Capua to Naples, the distance is but fifteen miles, 
over a flat uninteresting country. We entered " this thin 
city in the world" in the middle of the afternoon, and wen 
immediately surrounded with beggars of every conceivable 
degree of misery. We sat an hour at the gate while oui 
passports were recorded, and the vetturino examined, an< 
then, passing up a noble street, entered a dense crowd, 
through which was creeping slowly a double line of car. 
riages. The mounted dragoons compelled our postillion t( 
fall into the line, and we were two hours following in 
fashionable corso with our mud-spattered vehicle and tired 
Tiorses, surrounded by all that was brilliant and gay ii 
Naples. It was the last day of carnival. Every body was 
abroad, and we were forced, however unwillingly, to see all 
the rank and beaut}'- of the city. The carriages in this fin< 
climate are all open, and the ladies were in full dress. As 
we entered the Toledo, the cavalcade came to a halt, ane 
with hats off and handkerchiefs flying in every directioi 
about them, the young new-married queen of Naples rode 
up the middle of the street, preceded and followed by out- 
riders in the gayest livery. She has been married about a 
month ; is but seventeen, and is acknowledged to be the 
most beautiful woman in the kingdom. The description I 
had heard of her, though very extravagant, had hardly 



THE BAY OF NAPLES, 



31 



done her justice. She is a little above the middle height, 
with a fine lift to her head and neck, and a countenance 
only less modest and maidenly than noble. 



LETTER VIIL 
NAPLES. 



VISIT TO HERCULANEUM A^ D POMPEII. 

February, 1835. 

I have passed my first day in Naples in wandering about, 
without any definite object. I have walked around its 
famous bay ; looked at the lazzaroni ; watched the smoke 
of Vesuvius ; traversed the square where the young Con- 
radinewas beheaded, and Masaniello commenced his revolt; 
mounted to the castle of St. Elmo, and dined on macaroni 
in a trattoria, where the Italian I had learned in Tuscany 
was of little more use to me than Greek. 

The bay surprised me most. It is a collection of beauties, 
which seems more a miracle than an accident of nature. It 
is a deep crescent of sixteen miles across, and a little more 
in length, between the points of which lies a chain of low 
mountains, called the island of Capri, looking from the 
shore like a vast heap of clouds brooding at sea. In the 
bosom of the crescent lies Naples. Its palaces and principal 
buildings cluster around the base of an abrupt hill crowned 
by the castle of St. Elmo, and its half million of inhabitants 
have stretched their dwellings over the plain towards Vesu- 
vius, and back upon Posilippo, bordering the curve of the 
shore on the right and left with a broad white band of city 
and village for twelve or fourteen miles. Back from this, 
on the southern side, a very gradual ascent brings your eye 
to the base of Vesuvius, which rises from the plain in a 
sharp cone, broken in at the top; its black and lava-streaked 
sides descending with the evenness of a sand-hill, on one 
side to the disinterred city of Pompeii, and on the other to 
the royal palace of Portici, built over the yet unexplored 
Herculaneum. In the centre of the crescent of the shore, 



32 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

projecting into the sea by a bridge of two or three hundred 
feet in length, stands a small castle, built upon a rock, on 
one side of which lies the mole with its shipping. The other, 
side is bordered, close to the beach, with the gardens of the 
royal villa, a magnificent promenade of a mile, ornamented 
with fancy temples and statuary, on the smooth alleys of 
which may be met, at certain hours, all that is brilliant and 
gay in Naples. Farther on, toward the northern horn of 
the bay, lies the Mount of Posilippo, the ancient coast of 
Baise, Cape Misenum, and the mountain isles of Procida 
and Ischia ; the last of which still preserves the costumes of 
Greece, from which it was colonized, centuries ago. The 
bay itself is as blue as the sky, scarcely ruffled all day with 
the wind, and covered by countless boats fishing or creeping 
on with their picturesque lattine sails just filled ; while the 
atmosphere over sea, city, and mountain, is of a clearness 
and brilliancy which is inconceivable in other countries. 
The superiority of the sky and climate of Italy is no fable 
in any part of this delicious land ; but in Naples, if the day 
I have spent here is a fair specimen, it is matchless even for 
Italy, There is something like a fine blue veil of a most 
dazzling transparency over the mountains around, but above 
and between there seems nothing but viewless space — 
nothing like air that a bird could rise upon. The eye gets 

intoxicated almost with gazing on it. 

****** 

We have just returned from our first excursion to Pompeii. 
It lies on the southern side of the bay, just below the vol- 
cano which overwhelmed it, about twelve miles from Naples. 
The road lay along the shore, and is lined with villages 
which are only separated by name. The first is Portici, 
where the king has a summer palace, through the court of 
which the road passes. It is built over Herculaneum ; and 
the danger of undermining it has stopped the excavations of 
probably the richest city buried by Vesuvius. We stopped 
at a little gate in the midst of the village, and taking a 
guide and two torches, descended to the only part of it now 
visible, by near a hundred steps. We found ourselves at the 
back of an amphitheatre. W T e entered the narrow passage, 
and the guide pointed to several of the upper seats for the 
spectators which had been partially dug out. They were 



POMPEII. 33 

xied with marble, as the whole amphitheatre appears to 
have been. To realize the effect of these ruins, it is to be 
remembered that they are imbedded in solid lava, like rock, 
near a hundred feet deep, and that a city, which is itself 
ancient, is built above them. The carriage in which we 
came stood high over our heads, in a time-worn street, and 
ages had passed, and many generations of men had lived and 
died over a splendid city, whose very name had been for- 
gotten ! It was discovered in sinking a well, which struck 
the door of the amphitheatre. The guide took us through 
several other long passages dug across and around it, show- 
ing us the orchestra, the stage, the numerous entrances, and 
the bases of several statues which are taken to the museum 
at Naples. This is the only part of the excavation that 
remains open, the others having again been filled with 
rubbish. The noise of the carriages overhead in the street 
of Portici was like' deafening thunder. 

In a hurry to get to Pompeii, which is much more inter- 
esting, we ascended to daylight, and drove on. Coasting 
along the curve of the bay, with only a succession of villas 
and gardens between us and the beach, we soon came to 
Torre del Greco, a small town which was overwhelmed by 
an eruption thirty-nine years ago. Vesuvius here rises 
gradually on the left, the crater being at a distance of five 
miles. The road crossed the bed of dry lava, which extends 
to the sea in a broad black mass of cinders, giving the coun- 
try the most desolate aspect. The town is rebuilt just 
beyond the ashes, and the streets are crowded with the 
thoughtless inhabitants, who buy and sell, and lounge in 
the sun, with no more remembrance or fear of the volcano 
than the people of a city in America. 

Another half hour brought us to a long, high bank of 
earth and ashes, thrown out from the excavations ; and 
passing on, we stopped at the gate of Pompeii. A guide 
met us, and we entered. We found ourselves in the ruins 
of a public square, surrounded with small low columns of 
red marble. On the right were several small prisons, in 
one of which was found the skeleton of a man with its feet 
in iron stocks. The cell was very small, and the poor 
fellow must have been suffocated without even a hope of 
escape. The columns just in front were scratched with 



34 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

ancient names, possibly those of the guard stationed at the 
door of the prison. This square is surrounded with shops, 
in which were found the relics and riches of tradesmen, 
consisting of an immense variety. In one of the buildings 
was found the skeleton of a new-born child, and in one part 
of the square the skeletons of sixty men, supposed 'to be 
soldiers, who, in the severity of Roman discipline, dared 
not fly, and perished at their post. There were several 
advertisements of gladiators on the pillars ; and it appears 
that at the time of the eruption the inhabitants of Pompeii 
were principally assembled in the great amphitheatre at a 
show. 

We left the square, and, visiting several small private 
houses near it, passed into a street with a slight ascent, the 
pavement of which was worn deep with carriage-wheels. 
It appeared to have led from the upper part of the city di- 
rectly to the sea, and in rainy weather must have been quite 
a channel for water, as hi^h stones at small distances were 
placed across the street, leaving open places between for the 
carriage- wheels. I think there is a contrivance of the same 
kind in one of the streets of Baltimore. 

We mounted thence to higher ground, the part of the 
city not excavated. A peasant's hut and a large vineyard 
stand high above the ruins, and from the door the whole 
city and neighbourhood are seen to advantage. The effect 
of the scene is strange beyond description. Columns, painted 
walls, wheel-worn streets, amphitheatres, palaces, all as 
lonely and deserted as the grave, stand around you, and 
behind is a poor cottage and a vineyard of fresh earth just 
putting forth its buds — and beyond, the broad blue, familiar 
bay, covered with steam-boats and sails, and populous 
modern Naples in the distance — a scene as strangely 
mingled, perhaps, as any to be found in the world. We 
looked around for a while, and then walked on through 
the vineyard to the amphitheatre which lies beyond, near 
the other gate of the city. It is a gigantic ruin, completely 
excavated, and capable of containing twenty thousand spec- 
tators. The form is oval and the architecture particularly 
fine. Besides the many vomitories or passages for ingress 
and egress, there are three smaller allies, one used as the 
entrance for wild beasts, one for the gladiators, and the 



TEMPLE OF ISIS. 35 

third as that by which the dead were taken away. The 
skeletons of eight lions and a man, supposed to be their 
keeper, were found in one of the dens beneath, and those 
of five other persons near the different doors. It is pre- 
sumed that the greater proportion of the inhabitants of 
Pompeii must have escaped by sea, as the eruption occurred 
while they were nearly all assembled on this spot, and 
tkese few skeletons only have been found.* 

We returned through the vineyard, and, stopping at the 
cottage, called for some of the wine of the last vintage, 
(delicious, like all those in the neighbourhood of Vesuvius,) 
and, producing our basket of provisions, made a most agree- 
able dinner. Two parties of English passed while we were 
sitting at our out-of-doors table. Our attendant was an 
uncommonly pretty girl of sixteen, born on the spot and 
famous just now as the object of a young English noble- 
man's particular admiration. She is a fine, dark-eyed 
creature, but certainly no prettier than every fifth peasant 
girl in Italy. 

Having finished our picturesque meal, we went down 
into the ancient streets once more, and arrived at the small 
temple of Isis, a building in excellent preservation. On 
the altar stood, when it was excavated, a small statue of 
Isis, of exquisite workmanship, (now in the museum, to 
which all the curiosities of the place are carried,) and behind 
this we were show r n the secret penetralia, where the priests 
were concealed who uttered the oracles supposed to be pro- 
nounced by the goddess. The access was by a small secret 
flight of stairs, communicating with the apartments of the 
priests in the rear. The largest of these apartments was 
probably the refectory, and here was found a human ske- 
leton near a table, upon which lay dinner utensils, chicken 
bones, bones of fishes, bread and wine, and a faded garland 
of flowers. In the kitchen, which we next visited, were 
found cooking utensils, remains of food, and the skeleton of 
a man leaning against the wall with an axe in his hana, 
and near him a considerable hole, which he had evidently 
cut to make his escape when the door was stopped by cin- 
ders. The skeleton of one of the priests was found pros- 

* The number of skeletons hitherto disinterred in Pompeii and its suburbs is 
•three hundred — Stark. 

D 2 



86 PENCILLING^ BY THE WAY 

trate near the temple, and in his hand three hundred and 
sixty coins of silver, forty-two of bronze, and eight of gold* 
wrapped strongly in a cloth. He had probably stopped 
before his flight to load himself with the treasures of the 
temple, and was overtaken by the shower of cinders, and 
suffocated. The skeletons of one or two were found upon 
beds, supposed to have been smothered while asleep or ill. 
The temple is beautifully paved with mosaic, (as indeed 
are all the better private houses and public buildings of 
Pompeii,) and the open inner court is bordered with a 
quadrilateral portico. The building is of the Roman Doric 
order. 

We passed next across a small street to the tragic theatre, 
a large handsome building, where the seats for the vestals, 
consuls, and other places of honour, are well preserved, and 
thence up the hill to the temple of Hercules, which must 
have been a noble edifice, commanding a superb view of 
the sea. 

The next object was the triangular forum, an open space 
surrounded with three porticos, supported by a hundred 
Doric columns. Here were found several skeletons, one of 
which was that of a man who had loaded himself with 
plunder. Gold and silver coins, cups, rings, spoons, buckles, 
and other things, were found under him. Near here, under 
the ruins of a wall, were discovered skeletons of a man and 
a woman, and on the arms of the latter two beautiful 
bracelets of gold. 

We entered from this a broad street, lined with shops, 
against the walls of which were paintings in fresco and 
inscriptions in deep-red paint, representing the occupations 
and recording the names of the occupants. In one of them 
was found a piece of salt-fish, smelling strongly after seven- 
teen centuries ! In a small lane leading from this street, 
the guide led us to a shop decorated with pictures of fish of 
various kinds and furnished with a stove, marble dressers, 
and earthen jars, supposed to have belonged to a vender of 
fish and olives. A little further on was a baker's shop, with 
a well- used oven, in which was found a batch of bread 
burnt to a cinder. Near this was the house of a midwife. 
In it were found several instruments of a simple and excel- 
lent construction, unknown to the moderns, — a forceps r 



SUBURBS. 37 

remains of medicines in a wooden box, and various pestles 
and mortars. The walls were ornamented with frescos of 
the Graces, Venus and Adonis, and similar subjects. 

The Temple of the Pantheon is a magnificent ruin, and 
must have been one of the choicest in Pompeii. Its walls 
are decorated with exquisite paintings in fresco, arabesques, 
mosaics, &c, and its court is one hundred and eighty feet 
long, and two hundred and thirty broad, and contains an 
altar, around which are twelve pedestals for statues of the 
twelve principal deities of the ancients. Gutters of marble 
are placed at the base of the triclinium, to carry away the 
blood of the victims. A thousand coins of bronze, and 
forty or fifty of silver, were found near the sanctuary. 

We passed on to the Curia, a semicircular building, for 
the discussion of matters of religion by the magistrates ; a 
temple of Romulus; the remains of a temple of Janus; a 
splendid building called the ckalcidicum, constructed by the 
priestess Eumachea and her son, and dedicated as a temple 
of Concord, and came at last, by a regular ascent, into a 
large and spacious square, called the forum civile. This 
part of the city of Pompeii must have been extremely im- 
posing. Porticos, supported by noble columns, encompassed 
its vast area ; the pedestals of colossal statues, erected to 
distinguished citizens, are placed at the corners ; ,at the 
northern extremity rose a stately temple of Jupiter ; on 
the right was another temple to Venus ; beyond, a large 
public edifice, the use of which is not known ; across the 
narrow street which bounds it, stood the Basilica, an im- 
mense building, which served as a court of justice and 
an exchange. 

We passed out at the gate of the city and stopped at a 
sentry-box, in which was found a skeleton in full armour — 
a soldier who had died at his post ! From hence formerly 
the road descended directly to the sea, and for some distance 
was lined on either side with the magnificent tombs of the 
Pompeians. Among them was that of the vestal virgins, 
left unfinished when the city was destroyed ; a very 
nandsome tomb, in which was found the skeleton of a 
woman, (who had probably attempted to rob before her 
flight,) with a lamp in one hand and jewels in the other, 
and a very handsome square monument, with a beautiful 



38 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

relievo on one of the slabs, representing (as emblematic of 
death) a ship furling her sails on coming into port. Near 
on 8 of the large family sepulchres stands a small semicir- 
cular room, intended for the funeral feast after a burial ; 
and here were found the remains of three men around 'a 
table, scattered with relics of a meal. They were over- 
whelmed ere their feast was concluded over the dead ! 

The principal inn of Pompeii was just inside the gate, 
We went over the ruins of it. The skeleton of an ass was 
found chained to a ring in the stable, and the tire of a 
wheel lay in the court-yard. Chequers are painted on the 
side of the door, as a sign. 

Below the tombs stands the suburban villa of Diomed, 
one of the most sumptuous edifices of Pompeii. Here was 
found every thing that the age could furnish for the dwell- 
ing of a man of wealth. Statues, frescos, jewels, wine, 
household utensils of every description, skeletons of servants 
and dogs, and every kind of elegant furniture. The family 
was large, and in the first moment of terror they all re- 
treated to a wine vault under the villa, where their skele- 
tons (eighteen grown persons and two children) were found 
seventeen centuries after ! There was really something 
startling in walking through the deserted rooms of this 
beautiful villa — more than one feels elsewhere in Pompeii, 
for it is more like the elegance and taste of our own day ; 
and with the brightness of the preserved walls, and the 
certainty with which the use of each room is ascertained, 
it seems as if the living inhabitant would step from some 
corner and welcome you. The figures on the walls are as 
fresh as if done yesterday. The baths look as if they might 
scarce be dry from use. It seems incredible that the whole 
Christian age has elapsed since this was a human dwelling 
— occupied by its last family 'while our Saviour was walking 
the earth ! 

It would be tedious to enumerate all the curious places 
to which the guide led us in this extraordinary city. On 
our return through the streets, among the objects of 
interest was the house of Sallust the historian. I did not 
think, when reading his beautiful Latin at school, that I 
should ever sit down in his parlour. Sallust was rich, and 
his house is uncommonly handsome. Here is his chamber, 



WINE-VAULTS OF DIOMED. 39 

his inner court, his kitchen, his garden, his dining-room, 
his guest-chamber, all perfectly distinguishable by the sym- 
bolical frescos on the walls. In the court was a fountain, 
of pretty construction, and opposite, in the rear, was a? 
flower-garden, containing arrangements for dining in open 
air in summer. The skeleton of a female, (supposed to be 
the wife of the historian,) and three servants, known by 
their different ornaments, were found near the door of 
the street. 

We passed a druggist's shop and a cook-shop, and entered, 
treading on a beautiful mosaic floor, the " house of the dra- 
matic poet," so named from the character of the paintings 
with which it is ornamented throughout. The frescos 
found here are the finest ancient paintings in the world ; 
and from some peculiarity in the rings upon the fingers of 
the female figures, they are supposed to be family portraits. 
With assistance like this, how easily the imagination re- 
peoples these deserted dwellings ! 

A heavy shower drove us to the shelter of the wine- 
vaults of Diomed, as we were about stepping into our 
carriage to return to Naples. We spent the time in explor- 
ing, and found some thirty or forty earthen jars still half- 
buried in the ashes which drifted through the loop-holes of 
the cellar. In another half hour the black cloud had passed 
away over Vesuvius, and the sun set behind Posilippo in a 
flood of splendour. We were at home soon after dark, 
having had our fill of astonishment for once. I have seen 
nothing in my life so remarkable as this disentombed city. 
I have passed over, in the description, many things which 
were well worth noting, but it would have grown into a 
mere catalogue else. It is a privilege to realise these things, 
which could not be bought too dearly, and they cannot be 
realised but by the eye. Description conveys but a poor 
shadow of them to the fancy. 



40 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 



LETTER IX. 

/.CCOUNT OF VESUVIUS THE HERMITAGE — THE FAMOUS LA- 

GRIMA CHItlSTI DIFFICULTIES OF THE PATH — CURIOUS AP- 
PEARANCE OF THE OLD CRATER — ODD ASSEMBLAGE OF TRAVEL- 
LERS THE NEW CRATER SPLENDID PROSPECT MR. M , 

AUTHOR OF THE * PURSUITS OF LITERATURE * THF ARCH- 

, BISHOP OF TARENTO. 

Mounted upon asses much smaller than their riders, and 
with each a bare-legged driver behind, we commenced the 
ascent of Vesuvius. It was a troublesome path, worn 
through the rough scoria of old eruptions, and after two 
hours' toiling, we were glad to dismount at " the hermit- 
age/' Here lives a capuchin friar on a prominent rib in 
the side of the volcano, the red-hot lava dividing above his 
dwelling every year or two, and coursing away to the val- 
ley in two rivers of fire on either side of him. He has been 
there twelve years, and supports himself and probably half 
his brotherhood at the monastery by selling lagrima Christ i 
to strangers. It is a small white building with a little 
grass and a few trees about it, and looks like an island in 
the black waste of cinders and lava. 

A shout from the guide was answered by the opening of 
a small window above, and the shaven crown of the old 
friar was thrust forth with a welcome and a request, that 
we would mount the stairs to the parlour. He received us 
at the top, and gave us chairs aiound a plain board table, 
upon which he set several bottles of the far-famed wine of 
Vesuvius. One drinks it, and blesses the volcano that 
warmed the roots of the grape. It is a ripe, rich, full-bodied 
liquor, which i€ ascends me into the brain" sooner than any 
Continental wine I have tasted. I never drank any thing 
more delicious. 

We re-mounted our asses ana rode on. much more in- 
different than before to the roughness of the path. It 
strikes one like the road to the infernal regions ; — no grass, 
not a shrub, nothing but a wide mountain of cinders, black 
and rugged, diversified only by the deeper die of the newer 
streaks of lava. The eye wearied of gazing on it. We 



VESUVIUS. 41 

mounted thus for an hour or more, arriving at last at the 
base of a lofty cone whose sides were but slopes of deep 
ashes. We left our donkeys here in company with those 
of a large party that had preceded us, and made preparations 
to ascend on foot. The drivers unlaced their sashes, and, 
passing them round the waists of the ladies, took the ends 
over their shoulders, and proceeded. Harder work could 
scarce be conceived. The feet had no hold, sinking knee 
deep at every step, and we slipped back so much, that our 
progress was almost imperceptible. The ladies were soon 
tired out, although more than half dragged up by the 
guides. At every few steps there was a general cry for a 
halt, and we lay down in the warm ashes, quite breathless 
and discouraged. 

In something more than an hour from the hermitage we 
reached the edge .of the old crater. The scene here was 
very curious. A hollow, perhaps a mile round, composed 
entirely of scoria (like the cinders under a blacksmith's 
window), contained in its centre the sharp new cone of the 
last eruption. Around, in various directions, sat some thirty 
groups of travellers, with each their six or seven Italian 
guides, refreshing themselves with a lunch after the fatigues 
of the ascent. They were English, Germans, French, 
Russians, and Italians, each speaking their own language; 
and the largest party, oddly enough, was from the United 
States. As 1 was myself travelling with foreigners, and 
found my countrymen on Vesuvius unexpectedly, the mix- 
ture of nations appeared still more extraordinary. The 
combined heat of the sun and the volcano beneath us had 
compelled the Italians to throw off half their dress, and 
they sat, or stood leaning on their long pikes, with their 
brown faces and dark eyes glowing with heat, as fine models 
of ruffians as ever startled a traveller in this country of 
bandits. Eight or ten of them were grouped around a 
crack in the crater, roasting apples and toasting bread. 
There were several of these cracks winding about in dif- 
ferent directions, of which 1 could barely endure the heat, 
holding my hand at the top. A stick thrust in a foot or 
more, was burnt black in a moment. 

With another bottle or two of " lagrima Christi " and a 
roasted apple, our courage was renewed, and we picked our 



4Ct PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

way across the old crater, sometimes lost in the smoke 
which steamed up through the cracks, and here and there 
treading on beautiful beds of crystals of sulphur. The 
ascent of the new cone was shorter but very difficult. The 
ashes were so new and light, that it was like a steep sand- 
bank, giving discouragingly at the least pressure, and 1 sink- 
ing till the next step was taken. The steams of sulphur, 
as w r e approached the summit, were all but intolerable. 
The ladies coughed, the guides sneezed and called on the 
Madonna, and I never was more relieved than in catching 
the first clear draught of wind on the top of the mountain. 

Here we all stood at last crowded together on the nar- 
row edge of a crater formed within the year, and liable 
every moment to be overwhelmed with burning lava. There 
was scarce room to stand, and the hot ashes burnt our feet 
as they sunk into it. The females of each party sunk to 
the ground, and the common danger and toil breaking down 
the usual stiff barrier of silence between strangers, the 
conversation became general, and the hour on the crater's 
edge passed very agreeably. 

A strong lad could barely throw a stone from one side to 
the other of the new crater. It was about forty feet deep, 
perhaps more, and one crust of sulphur lined the whole. It 
was half the time obscured in smoke, which poured in 
volumes from the broad cracks with which it was divided 
in every direction ; and occasionally an eddy of wind was 
caught in the vast bowl, and for a minute its bright yellow 
surface was perfectly clear. There had not been an eruption 
for four or five months, and the abyss which is for years 
together a pit of fire and boiling lava, has had time to 
harden over ; and were it not for the smoking seams, one 
would scarce suspect the existence of the tremendous vol- 
cano slumbering beneath. 

After we had been on the summit a few minutes, an 
English clergyman of my acquaintance, to our surprise, 
emerged from the smoke. He had been to the bottom for 
specimens of sulphur for his cabinet. Contrary to the 
advice of the guide, I profitted by his experience, and dis- 
appearing in the flying clouds, reached the lowest depth of 
the crater with some difficulties of foot-hold and breath. 
The cracks w T hich I crossed twice, were so brittle as to 



VESUVIUS. 43 

break like the upper ice of a twice frozen pond beneath my 
feet, and the stench of the exhaling gases was nauseating 
beyond all the sulphuretted hydrogen I have ever known- 
The sensation was painfully suffocating from the moment 
I entered the crater. I broke as many bits of the bright 
golden crystals from the crust as my confusion and failing 
strength would allow, and then remounted, feeling my way 
up through the smoke to the summit. 

I can compare standing on the top of Vesuvius and look- 
ing down upon the bay and city of Naples, to nothing but 
mounting a peak in the infernal regions overlooking para- 
dise. The larger crater encircles you entirely for a mile, 
cutting off the view of the sides of the mountain; and from 
the elevation of the new cone, you look over the rising edge 
of this black field of smoke and cinders, and drop the eye at 
once upon Naples, lying asleep in the sun, with its lazy 
sails upon the water, and the green hills enclosing it clad 
in the indescribable beauty of an Italian atmosphere. Be- 
yond all comparison, by the testimony of every writer and 
traveller, the most beautiful scene in the world : — the love- 
liest water and the brightest land lay spread out before us. 
With the stench of hot sulphur in our nostrils, ankle deep 
in black ashes, and a waste of smouldering cinders in every 
direction around us, the enjoyment of the view certainly 
did not want for the heightening of contrast. 

We made our descent by jumps through the sliding ashes, 
frequently tumbling over each other, and retracing in five 
minutes the toil of an hour. Our donkeys stood tethered 
together on the herbless field of cinders, and we were soon 
in the clumsy saddles ; and with a call at the hermitage, 
and a parting draught of wine with the friar, we reached 
our carriages at the little village of Resina in safety. The 
feet of the whole troop were in a wretched condition. The 
ladies had worn shoes, or slight boots, which were cut to* 
pieces of course; and one very fine-looking girl, the daughter 
of an elderly French gentleman, had with the usual impro- 
vidence of her nation, started in satin slippers. She was 
probably lamed for a month, as she insisted on persevering, 
and wrapped her feet in handkerchiefs to return. 

We rode along the curve of the bay, by one of these 
matchless sunsets of Italy, and arrived at Naples at dark. 



44 PENCILLING^! BY THE WAY. 

I have had the pleasure lately of making the acquaintance 

of Mr. M , the distinguished author of the ' Pursuits of 

Literature/ and the translator of Spenser and other English 
poets into Italian. About twenty years ago, this well, 
known scholar came to Italy, on a desperate experiment of 
health. Finding himself better, almost against hope, he has 
remained from year to year in Naples, in love with the 
climate and the language, until, at this day, he belongs less 
to the English than the Italian literature, having written 
various original poems in Italian, and translated into Italian 
verse to the wonder and admiration of the scholars of the 
country. I found him this morning at his lodgings, in an 
old palace on the Pizzofalcone, buried in books as usual, 
^tnd good-humoured enough to give an hour to a young 
man, who had no claim on him beyond the ordinary interest 
in a distinguished scholar. He talked a great deal of 
America naturally, and expressed a very strong friendship 
for Mr. Everett, whom he had met on his travels, request- 
ing me at the same time to take him a set of his works as 
a remembrance. Mr. M — — . is a small man, of perhaps 
sixty years, perfectly bald, and a little inclined to corpu- 
lency. His head is ample, and would make a fine picture 
of a scholar. His voice is hurried and modest, and from 
long residence in Italy his English is full of Italian idioms. 
He spoke with rapture of Da Ponte, calling me back as I 
shut the door to ask for him. It seemed to give him un- 
common pleasure that we appreciated and valued him in 
America. 

I have looked over, this evening, a small volume, which 
he was kind enough to give me. It is entitled c Lyric 

Poetry, by T. I. M : a new edition, printed privately/ 

It is dated 1832, and the poems were probably all written 
within the last two years. The shortest extract I can make 
is a ic Sonnet to the Memory of Gray," which strikes me as 

ery beautiful. 

** Lord of the various lyre ' devout we turn 
Our pilgrim steps to thy supreme abode, 
And tread with awe the solitary road 
To grace with votive wreaths thy hallow'd urn. 
Yet as we wander through this dark sojourn, 
No more the strains we hear, that all abroad 
Thy fancy wafted, as the inspiring God 
Prompted • the thoughts that breathe, the words that bum/ 



AKCHU13UOP OF TARENTO 45» 

" But hark ! a voice, in solemn accents clear, 
Bursts from heaven's vault that glows with temperate fire : 
Cease, mortal, cease to drop the fruitless tear, 
Mute though the raptures of his full-strung lyre, 
"Sen his own warblings, lessened on his ear, 
Lost in seraphic harmony expire* 1 

A friend, whom I met at the same house, took me to see 
* the Aixhfeisl^p^ojlTarejito yesterday. This venerable man, 
„it is well known, lost his gown for his participation in the 
'cause of the Carbonari (the revolutionary conspirators of 
Italy). He has always played a conspicuous part in the 
^ politics of his time, and now, at the age of ninety, unlike 
-the usual fate of meddlers in troubled waters, he is a healthy, 
happy, venerated old man, surrounded in his palace with 
all that luxury can give him. The lady who presented me- 
'took the privilege of intimate friendship to call at an un- 
usual hour, and we found the old churchman in his slippers,, 
over his breakfast, with two immense tortoise-shell cats,, 
upon stools, watching his hand for bits of bread, and pur- 
ring most affectionately. He looks like one of Titian's- 
pictures. His face is a wreck of commanding features, and 
his eye seems less to have lost its fire, than to slumber in 
its deep socket. His hair is snowy white — his forehead of 
prodigious breadth and height — and his skin has that calm, 
settled, and yet healthy paleness, which carries with it the 
history of a whole life of temperance and thought. 

The old man rose from his chair with a smile, and came- 
forward with a stoop and a feeble step, and took my two 
hands, as my friend mentioned my name, and looked me in 
:he face very earnestly. " Your country," said he, in 
Italian, "has sprung into existence like Minerva, full-grown 
ind armed. We look for the result." He went on with 
some comments upon the dangers of republics, and then 
sent me to look at a portrait of Queen Giovanna, of Naples, 
oy Leonardo da Vinci, while he sat down to talk with the- 
ady who brought me. His secretary accompanied me as a 
ucerone. Five or six rooms, communicating with each 
)ther, were filled with choice pictures, every one a gift from 
jome distinguished individual. The present King of France- 
lad sent him his portrait; Queen Adelaide had sent a 
plendid set of Sevres china, with the portraits of her 



40* PENCILLING^ BY TKE WAY. 

miniature and that of Leopold ; the King and Queen of 
Naples had half furnished his house ; and so the catalogue 
went on. It seemed as if the whole Continent had united 
to honour the old man. While I was looking at a curious 
mosaic portrait of a cat, presented to him on the'death of 
the original, by some prince whose name I have forgotten, 
lie came to us, and said he had just learned that my pur- 
suits were literary, and would present me with his own 
last work. He opened the drawer of a small bureau and 
produced a manuscript of some ten pages, written in a 
feeble hand. " This," said he, "is an enumeration from 
memory of what I have not seen for many years — the classic 
spots about our beautiful city of Naples, and their associa- 
tions. I have written it in the last month to while away 
the time, and call up again the pleasure I have received 
many times in my life in visiting them." I put the curious 
document in my bosom with many thanks, and we kissed 
the hand of the good old priest and left him. We found 
liis carriage, with three or four servants in handsome livery, 
^raiting for him in the court below. We had intruded a 
little on the hour for his morning ride. 

I found his account of the environs merely a simple cata- 
logue, with here and there a classic quotation from a Greek 
or Latin author, referring to them. I keep the MS. as a 
curious memento of one of the noblest relics I have seen of 
an age gone by. 



LETTER X. 

NEAPOLITAN RACES BRILLIANT SHOW OF EQUIPAGES THE 

KING AND HIS BROTHER RANK AND CHARACTER OF THE 

JOCKIES DESCRIPTION OF THE RACES THE PUBLIC BURIAL- 
CJROUND OF NAPLES — THE LAZZARONI FREQUENCY OF ROB- 
BERIES AND ASSASSINATIONS THE MUSEUM OF NAPLES 

ANCIENT RELICS FROM POMPEII THE ANTIQUE CHAIR OF 

SALLUST THE VILLA OF CICERO THE BALBI FAMILY — GAL- 
LERY OF DIANS, CUPIDS, JOVES, MERCURIES, AND APOLLOS, 
STATUE OF ARIST1DES, &C. 

March, 1835. 

I have been all day at " the races." The King of Naples, 
who has a great admiration for every thing English, has 



NEAPOLITAN RACES. 47 

abandoned the Italian custom of running horses without 
riders through the crowded street, and has laid out a mag- 
nificent course on the summit of a broad hill overlooking 
the city on the east. Here he astonishes his subjects with 
ridden races ; and it was to see one of the best of the 
season that the whole fashionable world of Naples poured 
out to the campo this morning. The show of equipages 
was very brilliant : the liveries of the various ambassadors, 
and the court and nobles of the kingdom, showing on the 
bright green sward to great effect. I never saw a more 
even piece of turf, and it was fresh in the just-born vege- 
tation of spring. The carriages were drawn up in two 
lines nearly half round the course, and for an hour or two 
before the races the King and his brother, Prince Carlo, 
rode up and down between with the royal suite, splendidly 
mounted, the monarch himself upon a fiery grey blood 
horse, of uncommon power and beauty* The director was 
an Arragonese nobleman, cousin to the King, and as perfect 
a specimen of the Spanish cavalier as ever figured in the 
pages of romance. He was mounted on a Turkish horse, 
snow-white, and the finest animal I ever saw ; and he car- 
ried all eyes with him. as he dashed up and down, like a 
meteor. I like to see a fine specimen of a man, as I do a 
fine picture or an excellent horse, and I think I never saw 
a prettier spectacle of its kind, than this wild steed from the 
Balkan and his handsome rider. 

The King is tall, very r fat, but very erect ; of a light 
complexion,, and a good horseman, riding always in the 
English style, trotting and rising in the stirrup. Prince 
Charles is smaller and less kingly in his appearance, dresses 
carelessly and ill, and is surrounded always in public with 
half a dozen young Englishmen. 

The horses were led up and down — a delicate, fine-limbed 
sorrel mare, and a dark chestnut horse, compact and wiry 
— both English. The bets were arranged, the riders 
weighed, and, at the beat of a bell, off they went like 
arrows. It was a stirrring sight ! The course was about 
a mile round, and marked with red flags at short distances; 
and as the two flying creatures described the bright green 
circle, spread out like greyhounds, and running with an 
ease and grace that seemed entirely without effort, the King 



48 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY, 

flashed across the field followed by the whole court ; the 
Turkish steed of Don Giovanni restrained with difficulty 
in the rear, and leaping high in the air at every bound—. 
his nostrils expanded, and his head thrown up with the 
peculiar action of his race, while his snow-white mane and 
tail flew with every hair free to the wind. I had, myself, 
a small bet upon the sorrel. It was nothing — a pair of 
gloves, with a lady — but as the horses came round, the 
sorrel a whip's length a-head, and both shot by like the 
wind, scarce touching the earth apparently, and so even in 
their speed that the rider in blue might have kept his hand 
on the other's back, the excitement became breathless. 
Away they went again, past the starting-post, pattering, 
pattering with their slender hoofs, the sorrel still keeping 
her ground, and a thousand bright lips wishing the grace- 
ful creature success. Half way round the blue jacket began 
to whip. The sorrel still held her way, and I felt my gloves 
to be beyond peril. The royal cortege within the ring 
spurred across at the top of their speed to the starting- 
post. The horses came on — their nostrils open and panting, 
bounding upon the way with the same measured leaps a 
little longer and more eager than before; the rider of the 
sorrel leaning over the neck of his horse with a loose rein, 
and his whip hanging untouched from his wrist. Twenty 
leaps more ! With every one the rider of the chestnut gave 
the fine animal a blow\- The sorrel sprang desperately on, 
every nerve strained to the jump ; but at the instant that 
they passed the carriage in which I stood, the chestnut was 
developing his wiry frame in tremendous leaps, and had 
already gained on his opponent the length of his head. 
They were lost in the crowd that broke instantly into the 
course behind them, and in a moment after, a small red flag 
was waved from the stand. My favourite had lost ! 

The next race was ridden by a young Scottish nobleman, 
and the son of the former French ambassador, upon the 
horses with which they came to the ground. It was a 
match made upon the spot. The Frenchman was so pal- 
pably better mounted, that there was a general laugh when 
the ground was cleared and the two gentlemen spurred up 
and down to show themselves as antagonists. The Parisian 
Limself stuffed his white handkerchief in his bosom, and 



THE RACE. 49 

jammed down his hat upon his head with a confident 
laugh ; and among the ladies there was scarce a bet upon 
the grave Scotchman, who borrowed a stout whip, and rode 
his bony animal between the lines with a hard rein and 
his feet set firmly in the stirrups. The Frenchman gene- 
rously gave him every advantage, beginning with the inside 
of the ring. The bell struck, and the Scotchman drove his 
spurs into his horse's flanks and started away, laying on 
with his whip most industriously. His opponent followed, 
riding very gracefully, but apparently quite sure that he 
could overtake him at any moment, and content for the 
first round with merely showing himself off to the best 
advantage. Bound came the Scot, twenty leaps a-head, 
whipping unmercifully still ; the blood of his hired hack 
completely up, and himself as red in the face as an alder- 
man, and with his eye fixed only on the road. The long- 
tailed bay of the Frenchman came after, in handsome style, 
his rider sitting complacently upright, and gathering up his 
reins for the first time to put his horse to his speed. The 
Scotchman flogged on. The Frenchman had disdained to 
take a whip, but he drove his heels hard into his horse's 
sides soon after leaving the post, and leaned forward quite 
in earnest. The horses did remarkably well, both showing 
much more bottom than was expected. On they came, the 
latter gaining a little and working very hard. The other 
had lost his hat, and his red hair streamed back from his 
redder face; but flogging and spurring, with his teeth 
shut and his eyes steadily fixed on the road, he kept the 
most of his ground and rode away. They passed me a 
horse's length apart, and the Scotchman's whip, flying to 
the last, disappeared beyond me. He won the race by a 
couple of good leaps at least. The King was very much 
amused, and rode off laughing heartily, and the discomfited 
Frenchman came back to his party with a very ill-concealed 
dissatisfaction. 

A very amusing race followed between two midshipmen 
from an English corvette lying in the bay, and then the 
long lines of splendid equipages wheeled into train and 
dashed off the ground. The road, after leaving the campo, 
runs along the edge of the range of hills enclosing the city; 
and just below, within a high white wall, lies the public 

E 



50 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

burial-place of Naples. I had read so many harrowing de- 
scriptions of this spot, that my curiosity rose as we drove 
along in sight of it, and, requesting my friends to set me 
down, I joined an American of my acquaintance, and we 
started to visit it together. 

An old man opened the iron door, and we entered a 
clean, spacious, and well-paved area, with long rows of iron 
rings in the heavy slabs of the pavement. Without asking 
a« question, the old man walked across to the further corner, 
where stood a moveable lever, and, fastening the chain into 
the fixture, raised the massive stone cover of a pit. He 
requested us to stand back for a few minutes to give the 
effluvia time to escape, and then, sheltering our eyes with 
our hats, we looked in. You have read, of course, that 
there are three hundred and sixty-five pits in this place, 
one of which is opened every day for the dead of the city. 
They are thrown in without shroud or coffin, and the pit 
is sealed up at night for a year. They are thirty or forty 
feet deep, and each would contain perhaps two hundred 
bodies. 

It was some time before we could distinguish any thing in 
the darkness of the abyss. Fixing my eyes on one spot, 
however, the outlines of a body became defined gradually, 
and in a few minutes, sheltering my eyes completely from 
the sun above, I could see all the horrors of the scene but 
too distinctly. Eight corpses, all of grown persons, lay in 
a confused heap together, as they had been thrown in one 
after another in the course of the day. The last was a 
powerfully made, grey old man, who had fallen flat on his 
back, with his right hand lying across and half covering 
the face of a woman. By his full limbs and chest, and the 
darker colour of his legs below the knee, he was probably 
one of the lazzaroni, and had met with a sudden death. 
His right heel lay on the forehead of a young man, ema- 
ciated to the last degree, his chest thrown up as he lay, and 
his ribs showing like a skeleton covered with a skin. The 
close black curls of the latter, as his head rested on another 
body, were in such strong relief that I could have counted 
them. Off to the right, quite distinct from the heap, lay, 
in a beautiful attitude, a girl, as well as I could judge, of 
not more than nineteen or twenty. She had fallen on the 



CAMPO SANTO. 51 

pile and rolled or slid away. Her hair was very long and 
covered her left shoulder and bosom ; her arm was across 
her body ; and if her mother had laid her down to sleep^ 
she could not have disposed her limbs more decently. Th& 
head had fallen a little way to the right, and the feet, which 
were small, even for a lady, were pressed one against the 
other, as if she were about turning on her side. The sexton 
said that a young man had come with the body, and was 
very ill for some time after it was thrown in. We asked 
him if respectable people were brought here. " Yes," he 
said, " many. None but the rich would go to the expense 
of a separate grave for their relations. People were often 
brought in handsome grave-clothes, but they were always 
stripped before they were left. The shroud, whenever there 
was one, was the perquisite of the undertakers/' And thus 
are flung into this noisome pit, like beasts, the greater part 
of the inhabitants- of this vast city — the young and the old, 
the vicious and the virtuous together, without the decency 
even of a rag to keep up the distinctions of life ! Can 
human beings thus be thrown away ! — men like ourselves 
— women, children, like our sisters and brothers ! I never 
was so humiliated in my life as by this horrid spectacle. I 
did not think a man — a felon even, or a leper — what you 
will, that is guilty or debased — I did not think any- 
thing that had been human could be so recklessly aban- 
doned. Pah ! it makes one sick at heart ! God grant I 
may never die at Naples ! 

While we were recovering from our disgust, the old man 
lifted the stone from the pit destined to receive the dead of 
the following day. We looked in. The bottom was strewn 
with bones, already fleshless and dry. He wished us to see 
the dead of several previous days, but my stomach was 
already tried to its utmost. We paid our gratuity, and 
hurried away. A few steps from the gate, we met a man 
bearing a coffin on his head. Seeing that we came from 
the cemetery, he asked us if we wished to look into it. He 
set it down, and the lid opening with a hinge, we were 
horror-struck with the sight of seven dead infants ! The 
youngest was at least three months old ; the eldest perhaps 
a year ; and they lay heaped together like so many puppies, 
one or two of them spotted with disease, and all wasted to 

£ 2 



452 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

T)aby- skeletons. While we were looking at them, six or 
seven noisy children ran out from a small house at the 
road-side and surrounded the coffin. One was a fine girl of 
twelve years of age, and, instead of being at all shocked at 
the sight, she lifted the whitest of the dead things,, and 
looked at its face very earnestly, loading it with all the 
tenderest diminutives of the language. The others were 
busy in pointing to those they thought had been prettiest, 
and none of them betrayed fear or disgust. In answer to a 
question of my friend about the marks of disease, the man 
rudely pulled out one by the foot that lay below the rest, 
and, holding it up to show the marks upon it, tossed it 
again carelessly into the coffin. He had brought them 
from the hospital for infants, and they had died that morn- 
ing. The coffin was worn with use. He shut down the 
lid, and, lifting it again upon his head, went on to the 
cemetery, to empty it like so much offal upon the heap we 
had seen. 

I have been struck repeatedly with the little value at- 
tached to human life in Italy. I have seen sometimes these 
houseless lazzaroni literally dying in the streets, and no 
one curious enough to look at them. The most dreadful suf- 
ferings, the most despairing cries, in the open squares, are 
passed as unnoticed as the howling of a dog. The day 
before yesterday, a woman fell in the Toledo, in a fit — 
frothing at the mouth, and livid with pain ; and though 
the street was so crowded that one could make his way with 
difficulty, three or four ragged children were the only per- 
sons even looking at her. 

****** 

I have devoted a week to the Museum at Naples. It is a 
world ! Any thing like a full description of it would tire 
even an antiquary. It is one of those things (and there are 
many in Europe) that fortunately compel travel. You must 
come abroad to get an idea of it. 

The first day I buried myself among the curiosities found 
at Pompeii. After walking through the chambers and 
streets where they were found, I came to them naturally 
with an intense interest. I had visited a disentombed city, 
buried for seventeen centuries — had trodden in their 
wheel-tracks — had wanderal through their dining-rooms,. 



RELICS OF POMP.EII. 5St 

their chambers, their baths, their theatres, their market- 
places. And here were gathered in one place, their 
pictures, their statues, their cooking utensils, their orna- 
ments, the very food as it was found on their tables ! I 
am puzzled, in looking over my note-book, to know what 
to mention. The catalogue fills a printed volume. 

A curious corner in one of the cases was that containing 
the articles found on the toilet of the wealthiest Pompeian's 
wife. Here were pots of rouge, ivory pins, necklaces, ear- 
rings, bracelets, small silver mirrors, combs, ear-pickers, 
&c. &c. In the next case were two loaves of bread, found 
in a baker's oven, and stamped with his name. Two large 
cases of precious gems, cameos, and intaglios of all de- 
scriptions, stand in the centre of this room, (among which, 
by the way, the most exquisitely done, are two which 
one cannot look at without a blush.) Another case is filled 
with eatables, found upon the tables — eggs, fish-bones, 
honey-comb, grain, fruits, &c. In the repository for ancient 
glass are several cinerary urns, in which the ashes of the 
dead are perfectly preserved ; and numerous small glass 
lachrymatories, in which the tears of the survivors were 
deposited in the tombs. 

The brazen furniture of Pompeii, the lamps particularly, 
are of the most curious and beautiful models. Trees to 
which the lamps were suspended like fruit ; vines ; statues 
holding them in their hands, and numerous other con- 
trivances, were among them, exceeding far in beauty 
any similar furniture of our time. It appears that the 
ancients did not know the use of the fork, as every other 
article of table-service except this has been found here. 

To conceive the interest attached to the thousand things 
in this Museum, one must imagine a modern city — Boston, 
for example, completely buried by an unexpected and 
terrific convulsion of nature. Its inhabitants mostly escape, 
but from various causes leave their city entombed, and in a 
hundred years the grass grows over it, and its very locality 
is forgotten. Near two thousand years elapse, and then a 
peasant, digging in the field, strikes upon some of its ruins, 
and it is unearthed just as it stands at this moment, with all 
its utensils, books, pictures, houses, and streets, in untouched 
preservation. What a subject for speculation ! What food 



M PENCILLINGS BY THE WAT. 

for curiosity ! What a living and breathing chapter of 
history were this ! Far more interesting is Pompeii ; for 
the age in which it flourished and the characters who trod 
its streets are among the most remarkable in history. This- 
brazen lamp, shown to me to-day as a curiosity, was, lit 
every evening in the time of Christ. The handsome 
chambers through which I wandered a day or two ago, and 
from which were brought this antique chair, were the home 
of 'Sallust, and doubtless had been honoured by the visits of 
Cicero, (whose villa, half-excavated, is near by) and by all 
the poets, and scholars, and statesmen of his time. One 
might speculate endlessly thus ! And it is that which 
makes these lands of forgotten empires so delightful to the 
traveller. His mind is fed by the very air. He needs no 
amusements, no company, no books except the history of 
the place. The spot is peopled wherever he may stray, 
and the common necessities of life seem to pluck him from 
a far-reaching dream, in which he had summoned back 
receding ages, and was communing, face to face, with 
philosophers, and poets, and emperors, like a magician 
before his mirror. Pompeii and Herculaneum seem to me 
visions. I cannot shake myself and wake to their reality. 
My mind refuses to go back so far. Seventeen hundred 
years ! 

I followed the cicerone on, listening to his astonishing 
enumeration, and looking at everything as he pointed to it 
in a kind of stupor. One has but a certain capacity. We 
may be over-astonished. Still he went on in the same 
every- day tone, talking as indifferently of this and that 
surprising antiquity as a pedlar of his two-penny wares. 
We went from the bronzes to the hall of the papyri — 
thence to the hall of the frescos, and beautiful they were. 
Their very number makes them indescribable. The next 
morning we devoted to the statuary — and of this if I knew 
where to begin, I should like to say a word or two. 

First of all comes the Balbi family — father, mother, 
sons and daughters. He was proconsul of Herculaneum,. 
and by the excellence of the statues, which are life itself 
for nature, he and his family were worth the artist's best 
effort. He is a fine old Roman himself, and his wife is a 
tall, handsome woman, much better-looking than her 



HALL OP STATUARY. 

daughters. The two Misses Balbi are modest-looking girls, 
and that is all. They were the high-born damsels of 
Herculaneum, however; and, if human nature has not 
changed in seventeen centuries, they did not want admirers 
who compared them to the Venuses who have descended 
with them to the " Museo Borbonico." The eldest son is 
on horseback in armour. It is one of the finest equestrian 
statues in the world. He is a noble youth, of grave and 
handsome features, and sits the superb animal with the 
freedom of an Arab and the dignity of a Roman. It is a 
beautiful thing. If one had visited these Balbis, warm 
and living, in the time of Augustus, he could scarcely feel 
more acquainted with them than after having seen their 
statues as they stand before him here. 

Come a little farther on ! Bacchus on the shoulders of a 
faun — a child delighted with a grown up playfellow. I 
have given the same pleasure to just such another bright 
"picture in little" of human beauty. It moves one's 
heart to see it. 

Pass now a whole gallery of Dians, Cupids, Joves, 
Mercuries, and Apollos, and come to the presence of 
Aristides — him whom the Athenians exiled because they 
were tired of hearing him called ci The Just/' Canova 
has marked three spots upon the floor where the spectator 
should place himself to see to the best advantage this re- 
nowned statue. He stands, wrapped in his toga, with his 
head a little inclined, as if in reflection, and in his face 
there is a mixture of firmness and goodness, from which 
you read his character as clearly as if it were written across 
his forehead. It was found at Herculaneum, and is, 
perhaps, the simplest and most expressive statue in the 
world. 



56 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 



LETTER XI. 

BAIJE GROTTO OF PAUSILIPPO — TOMB OF VIRGIL POZZUOLI— 

RUINS OF THE TEMPLE OF JUPITER SERAPIS — THE LUCRINE 

LAKE — LAKE AVERNUS, THE TARTARUS OF VIRGIL TEMPE 

OF PROSERPINE GROTTO OF THE CUMiEAN SIBYL NERO'S 

. VILLA — CAPE OF MISENUM ROMAN VILLAS RUINS OF THE 

TEMPLE OF VENUS — CENTO CAMERELLE — THE STYGIAN LAKE 
THE ELSYIAN FIELDS GROTTO DEL CANI VILLA OF LUCULLUS. 

We made the excursion to Baiae on one of those prema- 
ture days of March common to Italy. A south wind 
and a warm sun gave it the feeling of June. The heat 
was even oppressive as we drove through the city, and the 
long echoing grotto of Pausilippo, always dim and cool, 
was peculiarly refreshing. Near the entrance to this curious 
passage under the mountain we stopped to visit the tomb of 
Virgil. A ragged boy took us up a steep path to the gate 
of a vineyard, and winding in among the just budding vines, 
we came to a small ravine, in the mouth of which, right 
over the deep cut of the grotto, stands the half-ruined 
mausoleum which held the bones of the poet. An Eng- 
lishman stood leaning against the entrance, reading from a 
pocket copy of the iEneid. He seemed ashamed to be 
caught with his classic, and put the book in his pocket as I 
came suddenly upon him, and walked off to the other side 
whistling an air from the Firata, which is playing just 
now at San Carlo. We went in, counted the niches for 
the urns, stood a few minutes to indulge in what recol- 
lections we could summon, and then mounted to the top to 
hunt for the "myrtle." Even its root was cut an inch or 
two below the ground. We found violets, however, and 
they answered as well. The pleasure of visiting such 
places, I think, is not found on the spot. The fatigue of 
the walk, the noise of a party, the difference between reality 
and imagination, and, worse than all, the caprice of mood- 
one or the other of these things disturbs and defeats for me 
the dearest promises of anticipation. It is the recollection 
that repays us. The picture recurs to the fancy till it 






GROTTO OF PADSILIPPO. 57 

becomes familiar ; and as the disagreeable circumstances of 
the visit fade from the memory, the imagination warms it 
into a poetic feeling, and we dwell upon it with the delight 
we looked for in vain when present. A few steps up the 
ravine, almost buried in luxuriant grass, stands a small 
marble tomb, covering the remains of an English girl. She 
died at Naples. It is as lovely a place to lie in as the world 
could show. Forward a little towards the edge of the hill 
some person of taste has constructed a little arbour, laced 
over with vines, from whence the city and suburbs of 
Naples are seen to the finest advantage— Paradise that 
it is ! 

It is odd to leave a city by a road piercing the base of a 
broad mountain, in at one side and out at the other, after a 
subterranean drive of near a mile ! The grotto of Pausilippo 
has been one of the wonders of the world these two 
thousand years, and it exceeds all expectation as a curiosity. 
Its length is stated at two thousand three hundred and 
sixteen feet, its breadth twenty-two, and its height eighty- 
nine. It is thronged with carts and beasts of burden of all 
descriptions ; and the echoing cries of these noisy Italian 
drivers are almost deafening. Lamps, struggling with the 
distant daylight as you near the end, just make darkness 
visible and standing in the centre and looking either way, 
the far distant arch of daylight glows like a fire through 
the cloud of dust. What with the impressiveness of the 
place, and the danger of driving in the dark amid so many 
obstructions, it is rather a stirring half-hour that is spent in 
its gloom. One emerges into the fresh open air and the 
bright light of day with a feeling of relief. 

The drive hence to Pozzuoli, four or five miles, was ex- 
tremely beautiful. The fields were covered with the new 
tender grain, and by the short passage through the grotto 
we had changed a busy and crowded city for scenes of as 
quiet rural lovelines as ever charmed the eye. We soon 
reached the lip of the bay, and then the road turned away 
to the right, along the beach, passing the small island of 
Nisida, (where Brutus had a villa, and which is now a 
prison for the carbonari.) 

Pozzuoli soon appeared, and, mounting a hill, we de- 
scended into its busy square, and were instantly beset by 



58 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

near a hundred guides, boatmen, and beggars, all preferring 
their claims and services at the tops of their voices. I fixed 
my eye on the most intelligent face among them, a curly- 
headed fellow in a red lazzaroni cap, and succeeded, with 
some loss of temper, in getting him aside from the 'crowd 
and bargaining for our boats. 

While the boatmen were forming themselves into a circle 
to cast lots for the bargain, we walked up to the famous 
ruins of the Temple of Jupiter Serapis. This was one of 
the largest and richest of the temples of antiquity. It was 
a quadrangular building, near the edge of the sea, lined 
with marble, and sustained by columns of solid cipollino, 
three of which are still standing. It was buried by an 
earthquake and forgotten for a century or two, till in 1750 
it was discovered by a peasant, who struck the top of one of 
the columns in digging. We stepped around over the 
prostrate fragments, building it up once more in fancy, and 
peopling the aisles with priests and worshippers. In the 
centre of the temple was the place of sacrifice, raised by 
flights of steps, and at the foot still remain two rings of 
Corinthian brass, to which the victims were fastened, and 
near them the receptacles for their blood and ashes. The 
whole scene has a stamp of grandeur. We obeyed the call 
of our red -bonnet guide, whose boat waited for us, at the 
temple stairs, very unwillingly. 

As we pushed off from the shore, we deviated a moment 
from our course to look at the ruins of the ancient mole. 
Here probably St. Paul set his foot, landing to pursue his 
way to Rome. The great apostle spent seven days at this 
place, which was then called Puteoli — a fact that attaches 
to it a deeper interest than it draws from all the antiquities 
of which it is the centre. 

We kept on our way along the beautiful bend of the 
shore of Baise, and passing on the right a small mountain 
formed in thirty-six hours by a volcanic explosion, some 
three hundred years ago, we came to the Lucrine Lake, so 
famous in the classics for its oysters. The same explosion 
that made the Monte Nuovo, and sunk the little village of 
Tripergole, destroyed the oyster-beds of the poets. 

A ten minutes' walk brought us to the shores of Lake 
Avernus — the "Tartarus" of Virgil. This was classic 



LAKE AVERNUS. 59 

ground indeed, and we hoped to have found a thumbed 
copy of the iEneid in the pocket of the cicerone. He had 
not even heard of the poet ! A ruin on the opposite shore,, 
reflected in the still, dark water, is supposed to have been a 
temple dedicated to Proserpine. If she was allowed to be 
present at her own worship, she might have been consoled 
for her abduction. A spot of more secluded loveliness could 
scarce be found. The lake lay like a sheet of silver at the 
foot of the ruined temple, the water looking unfathomably 
deep through the clear reflection ; and the fringes of low 
shrubbery leaning down on every side, were doubled in the 
bright mirror, the likeness even fairer than the reality. 

Our unsentimental guide hurried us away as we were 
seating ourselves upon the banks, and we struck into a 
narrow foot-path of wild shrubbery which circled the lake, 
and in a few minutes stood before the door of a grotto sunk 
in the side of the hill. Here dwelt the Cumsean sibyl, and 
by this dark passage the souls of the ancients passed from 
Tartarus to Elysium. The guide struck a light and kindled 
two large torches, and we followed him into the narrow 
cavern, walking downwards at a rapid pace for ten or fifteen 
minutes. With a turn to the right, we stood before a low- 
archway, which the guide entered, up to his knees in water 
at the first step. It looked like the mouth of an abyss, and 
the ladies refused to go on. Six or seven stout fellows had 
followed us in, and the guide assured us we should be safe 
on their backs. I mounted first myself to carry the torch, 
and holding my head very low, we went plunging on, turn- 
ing to the right and left through a crooked passage, dark as 
Erebus, till I was set down on a raised ledge called the 
sibyl's bed. The lady behind me, I soon discovered by her 
screams, had not made so prosperous a voyage. She had 
insisted on being taken up something in the side-saddle 
fashion ; and the man, not accustomed to hold so heavy a 
burden on his hip with one arm, had stumbled and let her 
slip up to her knees in water. He took her up immediately,, 
in his own homely but safer fashion, and she was soon set. 
beside me on the sibyl's stony couch, drenched with water, 
and quite out of temper with antiquities. 

The rest of the party followed, and the guide lifted the 
torches to the dripping roof of the cavern, and showed us 



€0 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

the remains of beautiful mosaic with which the place was 
once evidently encrusted. Whatever truth there may be 
in the existence of the sibyl, these had been, doubtlessly, 
luxurious baths, and probably devoted by the Roman em- 
perors to secret licentiousness. The guide pointed out to 
us a small perforation in the rear of the sibyl's bed, whence, 
he said, (by what authority I know not,) Caligula used to 
watch the lavations of the nymph. It communicates with 
,an outer chamber. 

We re-appeared, our nostrils edged with black from the 
smoke of the torches, and the ladies' dresses in a melancholy 
plight between smoke and water. It would be a witch of 
a sibyl that would tempt us to repeat our visit. 

We retraced our steps and embarked for Nero's villa. It 
was perhaps a half-mile farther down the bay. The only 
remains of it were some vapour-baths, built over a boiling 
spring which extended under the sea. One of our boatmen 
waded first a few feet into the surf, and, plunging under 
the cold sea water, brought up a handful of warm gravel— 
the evidence of a submarine outlet from the springs beyond. 
We then mounted a high and ruined flight of steps, and 
entered a series of chambers dug out of the rock, where an 
old man was stripping off his shirt, to go through the usual 
process of taking eggs down to boil in the fountain. He 
took his bucket, drew a long breath of fresh air, and rushed 
away by a dark passage, from whence he re-appeared in 
three or four minutes, the eggs boiled, and the perspiration 
streaming from his body like rain. He set the bucket 
down, and rushed to the door, gasping as if from suffoca- 
tion. The eggs were boiled hard, but the distress of the 
old man, and the danger of such sudden changes of atmos- 
phere to his health, quite destroyed our pleasure at the 
phenomenon. 

Hence to the cape of Misenum, the curve of the bay 
presents one continuation of Roman villas. And certainly 
there was not probably in the world a place more adapted 
to the luxury of which it was the scene. These natural 
baths, the many mineral waters, the balmy climate, the 
fertile soil, the lovely scenery, the matchless curve of the 
shore from Pozzuoli to the cape, and the vicinity, by that 
wonderful subterranean passage, to a populous capital on 



ROMAN VILLAS. 6l 

the other side of a range of mountains, rendered Baiae a 
natural paradise to the emperors. It was improved as we 
see. Temples to Venus, Diana, and Mercury ; the villas of 
Marius, of Hortensius, of Caesar, of Lucullus, and others 
whose masters are disputed, follow each other in rival 
beauty of situation. The ruins are not much now, except 
the temple of Venus, which is one of the most picturesque 
fragments of antiquity I have ever seen. The long vines 
hang through the rent in its circular roof, and the bright 
flowers cling to the crevices in its still half-splendid walls 
with the very poetry of decay. Our guide here proposed 
a lunch. We sat down on the immense stone which has- 
fallen from the ceiling, and in a few minutes the rough 
table was spread with a hundred open oysters from Fusaro, 
(near Lake Avernus,) bottles at will of lagrima Christi 
from Vesuvius; boiled crabs from the shore beneath the 
temple of Mercury ; fish from the Lucrine Lake, and bread 
from Pozzuoli. The meal was not less classic than refresh- 
ing. We drank to the goddess, (the only one in mythology 
by the way, whose worship has not fallen into contempt,) 
and leaving twenty ragged descendants of ancient Baiae to 
feast on the remains, mounted our donkeys and started over- 
land for Elysium. 

We passed the villa of Hortensius, to which Nero invited 
his mother, with the design of murdering her ; visited the 
immense subterranean chambers in which water was kept 
for the Roman fleet ; the horrid prisons called the Cento 
Camerelle of the emperors, and then mounting the hill at 
the extremity of the cape, the Stygian lake lay off on the 
right, a broad and gloomy pool, and around its banks spread 
the Elysian fields, the very home and centre of classic fable. 
An overflowed marsh and an adjacent corn-field will give 
you a perfect idea of it. The sun was setting while 
we swallowed our disappointment, and we turned our 
donkeys' heads towards Naples. 

We left the city again this morning by the grotto of 
Pausilippo, to visit the celebrated Grotto del Cani. It is 
about three miles off, on the borders of a pretty lake, once 
the crater of a volcano. On the way there arose a violent 
debate in the party on the propriety of subjecting the poor 
dogs to the distress of the common experiment. We had 



62 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

not yet decided the point when we stopped before the door 
of the keeper's house. Two miserable-looking terriers had 
set up a howl, accompanied with a ferocious and half- 
complaining bark from our first appearance around the turn 
of the road, and the appeal was effectual. We dismounted 
and walked towards the grotto, determined to refuse to see 
the phenomenon. Our scruples were unnecessary. The 
door was surrounded with another party less merciful ; and 
as we approached, two dogs were dragged out by the heels, 
and thrown lifeless on the grass. We gathered round them, 
and while the old woman coolly locked the door of the 
grotto, the poor animals began to kick, and, after a few 
convulsions, struggled to their feet and crept feebly away. 
Fresh dogs were offered to our party, but we contented 
ourselves with the more innocent experiments. The mephitie 
air of this cave rises to a foot above the surface of the ground, 
and a torch put into it was immediately extinguished. It 
has been described too often, however, to need a repetition. 
We took a long stroll around the lake, which was covered 
with wild-fowl, visited the remains of a villa of Lucullus 
on the opposite shore, and returned to Naples to dinner. 



LETTER XII. 
ROME. 

FRONT OF ST. PETER'S EQUIPAGES OF THE CARDINALS — -BEGGARS 

— BODY OF THE CHURCH TOMB OF ST. PETER THE TIBER 

FORTRESS-TOMB OF ADRIAN JEWS* QUARTER — FORUM — BAR- 

BEUINI PALACE — PORTRAIT OF BEATRICE CENCI — HER MELAN- 
CHOLY HISTORY PICTURE OF THE FORNARINA LIKENESS OF 

GIORGIONE'S MISTRESS JOSEPH AND POTIPHAR'S WIFE THE 

PALACES DORIAANDSCIARRA PORTRAIT OF OLIVIA WALDACHINI 

OF U A CELEBRATED WIDOW '* OF SEMIRAMIS CLAUDe's 

LANDSCAPES BRILL ; S — BREUGHEL'S — NOTTl's " WOMAN CATCH- 
ING FLEAS " DA VINCI'S QUEEN GIOVANNA PORTRAIT OF A 

FEMALE DORIA — PRINCE DORIA PALACE SCIARRA — BRILL ANE 

BOTH'S LANDSCAPES CLAUDE'S PICTURE OF NOAH INTOXI- 

CATED ROMANA'S FORNARINA— DA VINCl'S TWO PICTURES. 

March, 1835. 

Drawn in twenty different directions on starting from my 
-lodgings this morning, I found myself undecided where t( 



st. peter's. 5S 

pass my day, in front of St. Peter's. Some gorgeous cere- 
mony was just over, and the sumptuous equipages of the 
cardinals, blazing in the sun with their mountings of gold 
and silver, were driving up and dashing away from the end 
of the long colonnades, producing any effect upon the mind 
rather than a devout one. I stood admiring their fiery 
horses and gay liveries, till the last rattled from the square, 
and then mounted to the deserted church. Its vast vestibule 
was filled with beggars, diseased in every conceivable man- 
ner, halting, groping, and crawling about in search of 
strangers of whom to implore charity — a contrast to the 
splendid pavement beneath, and the gold and marble above 
and around, which would reconcile one to see the " mighty 
dome" melted into alms, and his Holiness reduced to a 
plain chapel and a rusty cassock. 

Lifting the curtain, I stood in the body of the church. 
There were perhaps twenty persons, at different distances, 
on its immense floor, the farthest off (six hundred and four- 
teen feet from me !) looking like a pigmy in the far per- 
spective. St. Peter's is less like a church than a collection 
of large churches inclosed under a gigantic roof. The chapels 
at the sides are larger than most houses of public worship in 
our country, and of these there may be eight or ten, not 
included in the effect of the vast interior. One is lost in 
it. It is a city of columns and sculpture and mosaic. Its 
walls are encrusted with precious stones and masterly work- 
manship to the very top, and its wealth may be conceived, 
when you remember that, standing in the centre and raising 
your eyes aloft, there are four hundred and forty feet be- 
tween you and the roo! of the dome — the height, almost, of 
a mountain. 

I walked up towards the tomb of St. Peter, passing in 
my way a solitary worshipper here and there, upon his 
knees, and arrested constantly by the exquisite beauty of 
the statuary with which the columns are carved. Accus- 
tomed, as we are in America, to churches rilled with pews, 
it is hardly possible to imagine the noble effect of a vast 
mosaic floor, unincumbered even with a chair, and only 
broken by a few prostrate figures, just specking its wide 
area. All catholic churches are without fixed seats, and 
St. Peter's seems scarce measurable to the eye, it is so far 
and clear, from one extremity to the other. 



1)4 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

I passed the hundred lamps burning over the tomb of 
St. Peter ; the lovely female statue, (covered with a bronze 
drapery, because its exquisite beauty was thought dangerous 
to the morality of the young priests) reclining upon the 
tomb of Paul III.; the ethereal figures of Canova's geniuses 
weeping at the door of the tomb of the Stuarts ; (where 
sleeps the unfortunate Charles Edward) the thousand, 

thousand rich and beautiful monuments of art and taste 

• 

crowding every corner of this wondrous church — I passed 
them, I say, with the same lost and unexamining, unpar- 
ticularizing feeling which I cannot overcome in this place— 
a mind quite borne off its feet, and confused and overwhelmed 
with the tide of astonishment — the one grand impression of 
the whole. I dare say, a little more familiarity with St. 
Peter's will do away the feeling, but I left the church, after 
two hours' loitering in its aisles, despairing, and scarce 
wishing to examine or make a note. 

Those beautiful fountains, moistening the air over the 
whole area of the column-encircled front ! — and that tall 
Egyptian pyramid, sending up its slender and perfect spire 
between ! One lingers about, and turns again and again 
to gaze around him, as he leaves St. Peter's in wonder and 
admiration. 

I crossed the Tiber at the fortress-tomb of Adrian, and, 
threading the long street at the western side of Rome, 
passed through the Jews' quarter, and entered the Forum. 
The sun lay warm among the ruins of the great temples 
and columns of ancient Rome, and, seating myself on a 
fragment of an antique frieze, near the noble arch of 
Septimius Severus, I gazed on the scene, for the first time, 
by daylight. 1 had been in Rome, on my first visit, during 
the full moon, and my impressions of the Forum with this 
romantic enhancement were vivid in my memory. One 
would think it enough to be upon the spot at any time, 
with light to see it ; but what with modern excavations, 
fresh banks of earth, carts, boys playing at marbles, and 
wooden sentry-boxes; and what with the Parisian pro- 
menade, made by the French through the centre, the ima- 
gination is too disturbed and hindered in daylight. The 
moon gives it all one covering of gray and silver. The old 
columns stand up in all their solitary majesty, wrecks of 
beauty and taste ; silence leaves the fancy to find a voice *qr 



BEATRICE CENCI. 65 

itself; and from the palaces of the Caesars to the prisons of 
the Capitol, the old train of emperors, senators, conspirators, 
and citizens, are summoned with but half a thought, and 
the magic glass is filled with moving and re-animated 
Rome. There, beneath those walls, on the right, in the 
Mamertine prisons, perished Jugurtha, (and there, too, were 
imprisoned St. Paul and St. Peter, and opposite, upon the 
Palatine-hill, lived the mighty masters of Rome, in the 
Palaces of the Caesars " and beneath the majestic arch 
beyond, were led, as a seal of their slavery, the captives 
from Jerusalem ; and in these temples, whose ruins cast 
their shadows at my feet, walked and discoursed Cicero and 
the philosophers, Brutus and the patriots, Catiline and the 
conspirators, Augustus and the scholars and poets, and the 
great stranger in Rome, St. Paul, gazing at the false altars, 
and burning in his heart to reveal to them the " unknown 
God/' What men have crossed the shadows of these very 
columns ! and what thoughts, that have moved the world, 

have been born beneath them ! 

****** 

The Barberini palace contains three or four masterpieces 
of painting. The most celebrated is the portrait of Beatrice 
Cenci, by Guido. The melancholy and strange history of 
this beautiful girl has been told in a variety of ways, and 
is probably familiar to every reader. Guido saw her on 
her way to execution, and has painted her as she was 
dressed, in the gray habit and head-dress made by her own 
hands, and finished but an hour before she put it on. There 
are engravings and copies of the picture all over the world, 
but none that I have seen give any idea of the excessive 
gentleness and serenity of the countenance. The eyes re- 
tain traces of weeping : but the child-like mouth, the soft 
girlish lines of features that look as if they never had worn 
more than the one expression of ycuthfulness and affection, 
are all in repose ; and the head is turned over the shoulder 
with as simple a sweetness as if she had but looked back 
to say a good-night before going to her chamber to sleep. 
She little looks like what she was — one of the firmest and 
boldest spirits whose history is recorded. After murdering 
her father for his fiendish attempts upon her virtue, she 
endured every torture rather than disgrace her family by 

F 



66 PENCILLING^ BY THE WAY. 

confession, and was only moved from her constancy, at last; 
by the agonies of her younger brother on the rack. Who 
would read capabilities like these, in these heaveniy and 
child-like features ? 

I have tried to purchase the life of the Cenci, ^n vain 
A bookseller told me to-day that it was a forbidden book, 
on account of its reflections upon the Pope. Immense in- 
terest was made for the poor girl ; but, it is said, the papal 
treasury ran low ; and if she was pardoned, the large pos- 
sessions of the Cenci family could not have been confiscated. 

The gallery contains also a delicious picture of the For- 
narina, by Raphael himself, and a portrait of Giorgione's 
mistress, as a Carthaginian slave — the same head multi- 
plied so often in his and Titian's pictures. The original 
of the admirable picture of Joseph and the wife of Poti- 
phar, is also here. A copy of it is in the gallery of 
Florence. 

I have passed a day between the two palaces Doria and 
Sciarra, nearly opposite each other in the Corso at Rome. 
The first is an immense gallery of perhaps a thousand 
pictures, distributed through seven large halls, and four 
galleries encircling the court. In the first four rooms I 
found nothing that struck me particularly. In the fifth 
was a portrait, by an unknown artist, of Olivia Waldachini, 
the favourite and sister-in-law of Pope Innocent X. — a 
handsome woman, with that round fulness in the throat 
and neck, which (whether it existed in the originals, or is 
a part of a painter's ideal of a woman of pleasure,) is uni- 
versal in portraits of that character. In the same room 
was a portrait of a f celebrated widow," by Vandyck,* a 
had-been beautiful woman, in a staid cap, (the hands won- 
derfully painted,) and a large and rich picture of Semi- 
ramis, by one of the Caracci. 

In the galleries hung the landscapes by Claude, famous 
through the world. It is like roving through a paradise, 
to sit and look at them. His broad green lawns, his half- 

* So called in the catalogue. The custode, however, told us it was a portrait 
of the wife of Vandyck, painted as an old woman to mortify her excessive 
vanity, when she was but twenty-three. He kept the picture until she was 
older, and, at the time of his death, it had become a flattering likeness, and 
was carefullv treasured bv the widow. 



PICTURES. 6T 

hidden temples, his life-like, luxuriant trees, his fountains,, 
his sunny streams — all flush into the eye like the bright 
opening of a Utopia, or some dream over a description from 
Boccaccio. It is what Italy might be in a golden age— her 
ruins rebuilt into the transparent air, her woods unprofaned, 
her people pastoral and refined, and every valley a land- 
scape of Arcadia. I can conceive no higher pleasure for 
the imagination than to see a Claude in travelling through 
Italy. It is finding a home for one's more visionary fan- 
cies — those children of moonshine that one begets in a 
colder clime, but scarce dares acknowledge till he has seen 
them under a more congenial sky. More plainly, one does 
not know whether his abstract imaginations of pastoral life 
and scenery are not ridiculous and unreal, till he has seen 
one of these landscapes, and felt steeped, if I may use such 
a word, in the very loveliness which inspired the pencil of 
the painter. There he finds the pastures, the groves, the 
fairy structures, the clear waters, the straying groupes, the 
whole delicious scenery, as bright as in his dreams, and he 
feels as if he should bless the artist for the liberty to ac- 
knowledge freely to himself the possibility of so beautiful 
a world. 

We went on through the long galleries, going back again 
and again to see the Claudes. In the third division of the 
gallery were one or two small and bright landscapes, by 
Brill, that would have enchanted us if seen elsewhere ; and 
four strange pictures, by Breughel, representing the four 
elements, by a kind of half-poetical, half-supernatural land- 
scapes, one of which had a very lovely view of a distant 
village. Then there was the famous picture of the (e woman 
catching fleas," by Gherardo della Notti, a perfect piece of 
life. She stands close to a lamp, with a vessel of hot water 
before her, and is just closing her thumb and finger over a 
flea, which she has detected on the bosom of her dress* 
Some eight or ten are boiling already in the water, and the 
expression upon the girl's face is that of the most grave 
and unconscious interest in her employment. Next to this 
amusing picture hangs a portrait of Queen Giovanna, of 
Naples, by Leonardo da Vinci ; a copy of which I had seen, 
much priced, in the possession of the Archbishop of Tarento. 
It scarce looks like the talented and ambitious queen she 

f 2 



68 PE.NCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

was, but it does full justice to her passion for amorous 
intrigue — a face full of the woman. 

The last picture we came to, was one not even men- 
tioned in the catalogue — an old portrait of one of the 
females of the Doria family. It was a girl of eighteen, 
with a kind of face that in life must have been extremely 
fascinating. While we were looking at it, we heard a kind 
,of gibbering laugh from the outer apartment, and an old 
man, in a cardinal's dress, dwarfish in size, and with de- 
formed and almost useless legs, came shuffling into the gal- 
lery,, supported by two priests. His features were imbe- 
cility itself, rendered almost horrible by the contrast of the 
cardinal's red cap. The custode took off his hat and bowed 
low, and the old man gave us a half bow and a long laugh 
in passing, and disappeared at the end of the gallery. This 
was the Prince Doria, the owner of the palace, and a car- 
dinal of Rome ! the sole remaining representative of one of 
the most powerful and ambitious families of Italy ! There 
could not be a more affecting type of the great u mistress of 
the world" herself. 

We crossed the Corso to the Palace Sciarra. The collec- 
tion here is small, but choice. Half a dozen exquisite 
landscapes, by Brill and Both, grace the second room. Here 
are also three small Claudes, very, very beautiful. In the 
next room is a finely-coloured but most indecent picture of 
Noah intoxicated, by Andrea Sacchi, and a portrait by 
Giulio Romano, of Raphael's celebrated Fornarina, to whose 
lovely face one becomes so accustomed in Italy that it seems 
like that of an acquaintance. 

In the last room are two of the most celebrated pictures 
in Rome. The first is by Leonardo da Vinci, arid repre- 
sents Vanity and Modesty, by two females standing toge- 
ther in conversation — one a handsome, gay, volatile-looking 
creature, covered with ornament, and listening unwillingly 
to what seems a lecture from the* other, upon her foibles. 
The face of the other is a heavenly conception of woman — 
earnest, delicate, and lovely — the ideal one forms to him- 
self, before intercourse with the w r orld gives him a distaste 
for its purity. The moral lesson of the picture is more 
forcible than language. The painter deserved to have 
died, as he did, in the arms of an emperor. 



ANCIENT ROME. 69 

The other picture represents two gamblers cheating a 
youth — a very striking piece of nature. It is common, 
from the engravings. On the opposite side of the room is 
a very expressive picture, by Schidone. On the ruins of 
an old tomb stands a skull, beneath which is written — i( I y 
too, was of Arcadia :" and, at a little distance, gazing at 
it in attitudes of earnest reflection, stand two shepherds, 
struck simultaneously with the moral. It is a poetical 
thought, and wrought out with great truth and skill. 

Our eyes aching and our attention exhausted with pic- 
tures, we drove from the Sciarra to the ruined palaces of 
the Csssars. Here, on an eminence above the Tiber, with 
the Forum beneath us on one side, the Coliseum on the 
other, and all the towers and spires of modern and Catholic 
Rome arising on her many hills beyond, we seated our- 
selves on fragments of marble half buried in the grass, and 
mused away the hours till sunset. On this spot Romulus 
founded Rome. The princely Augustus, in the last days 
of her glory, laid here the foundations of his imperial palace 
• — which, continued by Caligula and Tiberius, and com- 
pleted by Domitian, covered the hill, like a small city. It 
was a labyrinth of temples, baths, pavilions, fountains, and 
gardens, with a large theatre at the western extremity ; 
and adjoining the temple of Apollo, was a library filled 
with the best authors, and ornamented with a colossal 
bronze statue of Apollo, "of excellent Etruscan workman- 
ship." " Statues of the fifty daughters of Danaus sur- 
rounded the portico," (of this same temple,) " and opposite 
them were equestrian statues of their husbands." About a 
hundred years ago, accident discovered, in the gardens 
buried in rubbish, a magnificent hall, two hundred feet in 
length and one hundred and thirty- two in breadth, sup- 
posed to have been built by Domitian. It was richly orna- 
mented with statues and columns of precious marble, and 
near it were baths in excellent preservation. " But," says 
Stark, " immense and superb as was this first-built palace 
of the Caesars Nero, whose extravagance and passion for 
architecture knew no limits, thought it much too small for 
him, and extended its edifices and gardens from the Pala- 
tine to the Esquiline. After the destruction of the whole, 
by fire, sixty-five years after Christ, he added to it his 



70 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

celebrated 4 Golden House/ which extended from one extre* 
mity to the other of the Ccelian Hill." 

The ancient walls, which made the whole of the Mount 
Palatine a fortress, still hold together its earth and its ruins 
It is a broad tabular eminence, worn into footpaths, which 
wind at every moment around broken shafts of marble, 
fragments of statuary, or broken and ivy- covered fountains. 
Part of it is cultivated as a vineyard, by the degenerate 
modern Romans, and the baths, into which the water still 
pours from aqueducts encrusted with aged stalactites, are 
public washing-places for the contadini, eight or ten of 
whom were splashing away in their red jackets, with gold 
bodkins in their hair, while we were moralizing on their 
worthier progenitors of eighteen centuries ago. It is a 
beautiful spot of itself, and, with the delicious, soft sun- 
shine of an Italian spring, the tall green grass beneath our 
feet, and an air as soft as June just stirring the myrtles and* 
jasmines growing wild wherever the ruins gave them place, 
our enjoyment of the overpowering associations of the spot 
was ample and untroubled. I could wish every refined 
spirit in the world had shared our pleasant hour upon the 
Palatine. 



LETTEB XIII. 

ANNUAL DOWRIES TO TWELVE GIRLS — VESPERS IN THE CONVENT 

OE SANTA TRINITA RUINS OF ROMAN BATHS A MAGNIFICENT 

MODERN CHURCH WITHIN TWO ANCIENT HALLS — GARDENS OF 

MECiENAS TOWER WHENCE NERO SAW ROME ON FIRE HOUSES 

OF HORACE AND VIRGIL — BATHS OF TITUS AND CARACALLA. 

March 1853. 

The yearly ceremony of giving dowries to twelve girls was 
performed by the Pope, this morning, in the church built 
over the ancient temple of Minerva. His Holiness arrived, 
in state, from the Vatican, at ten ; followed by his red troop 
of cardinals, and preceded by a clerical courier, on a palfrey, 
and the body-guard of nobles. He blessed the crowd, right 
and left with his three fingers, (precisely as a Parisian 
•dandy salutes his friend across the street,) and, descending 






CEREMONY OF THE DOWRIES. 71 

from his carriage, (which is like a good-sized glass boudoir 
upon wheels, ) he was received in the papal sedan, and 
carried into the church by his Swiss bearers. My legation 
button carried me through the guard, and I found an ex- 
cellent place under a cardinal's wing, in the penetralia^ 
within the railing of the altar. Mass commenced presently, 
with a chaunt from the celebrated choir of St. Peter's. 
Room was then made through the crowd : the cardinals 
put on their red caps, and the small procession of twelve 
young girls entered from a side chapel, bearing each a taper 
in her hand, and robed to the eyes in white, with a chaplet 
of flowers round the forehead. I could form no judgment 
of any thing but their eyes and feet. A Roman eye could 
not be otherwise than fine, and a Roman woman's foot 
could scarce be other than ugly, and, consequently, there 
was but one satin slipper in the group that a man might 
not have worn, and every eye I could see, from my position, 
might have graced an improvisatrice. They stopped in 
front of the throne, and giving their long tapers to the 
servitors, mounted in couples, hand in hand, and kissed the 
foot of his Holiness, w 7 ho, at the same time, leaned over and 
blessed them, and then turning about, walked off again 
behind the altar in the same order in which they had 
entered. 

The choir now struck up their half-unearthly chaunt, (a 
music so strangely shrill and clear, that I scarce know 
whether the exquisite sensation is pleasure or pain,) the 
Pope was led from his throne to his sedan, and his mitre 
changed for a richly jewelled crown ; the bearers lifted 
their burden ; the guard presented arms ; the cardinals 
summoned their officious servants to unrobe, and the crowd 
poured out as it came. 

This ceremony, I found upon inquiry, is performed every 
year, on the day of the Annunciation — just nine months 
before Christmas, and is intended to commemorate the in- 
carnation of our Saviour. 

& * # •* * * 

As I was returning from a twilight stroll upon the 
Pincian hill, this evening, the bells of the convent of Santa 
lrmita rung to vespers. I had heard of the singing of the 
nuns in the service at the convent chapel, but the misbe- 



72 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

haviour of a party of English had excluded foreigners of 
late, and it was thought impossible to get admittance. I 
mounted the steps, however, and rung at the door. It was 
opened by a pale nun, of about thirty, who hesitated a 
moment, and let me pass. In a small plain chapel within, 
the service of the altar was just commencing, and, before I 
reached a seat, a low plaintive chaunt commenced, in female 
voices, from the choir. It went on, with occasional inter- 
ruptions from the prayers, for perhaps an hour. I cannot 
describe the excessive mournfulness of the music. One or 
two familiar hymns occurred in the course of it, like airs in 
a recitative, the same sung in our churches, but the effect 
was totally different. The neat white caps of the nuns 
were just visible over the railing before the organ, and, as 
I looked up at them and listened to their melancholy notes, 
they seemed, to me, mourning over their exclusion from the 
world. The small white cloud from the censer mounted to 
the ceiling, and, creeping away through the arches, hung 
over the organ till it was lost to the eye in the dimness of 
the twilight. It was easy, under the influence of their 
delightful music, to imagine within it the wings of that 
tranquilizing resignation one would think so necessary to 

keep down the heart in these lonely cloisters. 

****** 

The most considerable ruins of ancient Rome are those of 
the Baths. The Emperors Titus, Caracalla, Nero, and 
Agrippa, constructed these immense places of luxury, and 
the remains of them are among the most interesting and 
beautiful relics to be found in the world. It is possible 
that my readers have as imperfect an idea of the extent of a 
Roman bath as I have had, and I may as well quote from 
the information given by writers upon antiquities. 

" They were open every day to both sexes. In each of 
the great baths there were sixteen hundred seats of marble, 
for the convenience of tr^e bathers, and three thousand two 
hundred persons could bathe at the same time. There were 
splendid porticos in front, for promenade, arcades with 
shops, in which was found every kind of luxury for the 
bath, and halls for corporeal exercises, and for the discus- 
sion of philosophy; and here the poets read their pro- 
ductions, and rhetoricians harangued, and sculptors and 



ROMAN BATHS. 73 

painters exhibited their works to the public. The baths 
were distributed into grand halls, with ceilings enormously 
high, and painted with admirable frescos, supported on 
columns of the rarest marble, and the basins were of 
Oriental alabaster, porphyry, and jasper. There were in 
the centre vast reservoirs for the swimmers, and crowds of 
slaves to attend gratuitously upon all who should come/' 

The baths of Diocletian (which I visited to day) covered 
an enormous space. They occupied seven years in building, 
and were the work of forty thousand Christian slaves, two- 
thirds of whom died of fatigue and misery ! Mounting 
one of the seven hills of Rome, we came to some half- 
ruined arches, of enormous size, extending a long distance, 
in the sides of which were built two modern churches. 
One was the work of Michael Angelo, and one of his hap- 
piest efforts. He has turned two of the ancient halls into a 
magnificent church, in the shape of a Greek cross, leaving 
in their places eight gigantic columns of granite. After 
St. Peter's it is the most imposing church in Rome, 

We drove thence to the baths of Titus, passing the site 
of the ancient gardens of Mecaenas, in which still stands 
the tower from which Nero beheld the conflagration of 
Rome. The houses of Horace and Virgil communicated 
with this garden, but they are now undistinguishable. We 
turned up from the Coliseum to the left, and entered a 
gate leading to the baths of Titus. Five or six immense 
arches presented their front to us, in a state of picturesque 
ruin. We took a guide, and a long pole, with a lamp at 
the extremity, and descended to the subterranean halls, to 
see the still inimitable frescos upon the ceilings. Passing 
through vast apartments, to the ruined walls of which still 
clung, here and there, pieces of the finely-coloured stucco 
of the ancients, we entered a suite of long galleries, some 
forty feet high, the arched roofs of which were painted 
with the most exquisite art, in a kind of fanciful border- 
work, enclosing figures and landscapes, in as bright colours 
as if done yesterday. Farther on was the niche in which 
was found the famous group of Laocoon, in a room belong- 
ing to a subterranean palace of the emperor, communicating 
with the baths. The Belvidere Meleager was also found 
here. The imagination loses itself in attempting to con- 



74 PENCILLUSGS BY THE WAY. 

ceive the splendour of these under-ground palaces, blazing 
with artificial light ; ornamented with works of art, never 
equalled, and furnished with all the luxury which an em- 
peror of Rome, in the days when the wealth of the world 
flowed into her treasury, could command for his pleasure. 
How short life must have seemed to them, and what a ten- 
fold curse became death and the common ills of existence, 
interrupting or taking away pleasures so varied and in- 
exhaustible ! 

These baths were built in the last great days of Rome, 
and one reads the last stages of national corruption and, 
perhaps, the secret of her fall, in the character of these 
ornamented walls. They breathe the very spirit of volup- 
tuousness. Naked female figures fill every plafond ; and 
fauns and satyrs, with the most licentious passions in their 
faces, support the festoons and hold together the intricate 
ornament of the frescos. The statues, the pictures, the 
object of the place itself, inspired the wish for indulgence ; 
and the history of the private lives of the emperors and 
wealthier Romans shows the effect in its deepest colours. 

We went on to the baths of Caracalla, the largest ruins- 
of Rome. They are just below the palaces of the Caesars, 
and ten minutes' walk from the Coliseum. It is one laby- 
rinth of gigantic arches and ruined halls, the ivy growing 
and clinging wherever it can fasten its root, and the whole 
as fine a picture of decay as imagination could create. This 
was the favourite haunt of Shelley, and here he wrote his 
fine tragedy of Prometheus. He could not have selected a 
more fitting spot for solitary thought. A herd of goats- 
were climbing over one of the walls, and the idle boy who 
tended them lay asleep in the sun , and every footstep echoed 
loud through the place. We passed two or three hour* 
rambling about, and regained the populous streets of Rome 
in the last light of the sunset. 



fOMB OP THE SCIPIOS. 75 



LETTER XIV. 

SUMMER WEATHER IN MARCH BATHS OF CARACALLA — BEGINNING 

OF THE APPIAN WAY TOMB OF THE SCIPIOS CATACOMBS 

CHURCH OF SAN SEBASTIANO YOUNG CAPUCHIN FRIAR TOMBS 

OF THE EARLY CHRISTIAN MARTYRS CHAMBER WHERE THE 

APOSTLES WORSHIPPED — TOMB OF CECILIA METELLA — THE CAM- 
PA GN A CIRCUS OF CARACALLA OR ROMULUS TEMPLE DEDI- 
CATED TO RIDICULE — KEATS'S GRAVE— FOUNTAIN OF EGERIA 

HOLY WEEK. 

March, 1855. 

The last days of March have come, clothed in sunshine 
and summer. The grass is tall in the Campagna ; the fruit- 
trees are in blossom ; the roses and myrtles are in full 
flower; the shrubs -are in full leaf; the whole country 
about breathes of June. We left Rome this morning, on 
an excursion to the Fountain of Egeria. A more heavenly- 
day never broke. The gigantic baths of Caracalla turned 
us aside once more, and we stopped for an hour in the 
shade of their romantic arches, admiring the works, while 
we execrated the character of their ferocious builder. 

This is the beginning of the ancient Appian Way, and, 
a little farther on, sunk in the side of a hill, near the road, 
is the beautiful Doric tomb of the Scipios. We alighted at 
the antique gate, a kind of portico with seats of stone 
beneath, and, reading the inscription, " Sepulchro degli 
Scipioni," mounted, by ruined steps, to the tomb. A boy 
came out from the house in the vineyard above, with 
candles to show us the interior ; but, having no curiosity 
to see the damp cave from which the sarcophagi have been 
removed, (to the Museum) we sat down upon a bank of 
grass opposite the chaste facade, and recalled to memory the 
early-learnt history of the family once entombed within. 
The edifice (for it is more like a temple to a river- nymph 
or a dryad than a tomb) was built by an ancestor of the 
great Scipio Africanus, and here was deposited the noble 
dust of his children. One feels, in these places, as if the 
improvisatore's inspiration was about him — the fancy draws, 
in such vivid colours, the scenes that have passed where ne 
is standing. The bringing of the dead body of the conqueror 



76 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

of Africa from. Rome; the passing of the funeral train 
beneath the portico ; the noble mourners ; the crowd of 
people ; the eulogy of, perhaps, some poet or orator, whose 
name has descended to us — the air seems to speak, and the 
gray stones of the monument against which the mourners 
of Scipio have leaned, seemed to have had life and thought, 
like the ashes they have sheltered. 

We drove to the Catacombs. Here, the legend says, St. 
Sebastian was martyred ; and the modern church of San 
Sebastiano stands over the spot. We entered the church, 
where we found a very handsome young Capuchin friar, 
with his brown cowl and the white cord about his waist, 
who offered to conduct us to the catacombs. He took three 
wax-lights from the sacristy, and we entered a side-door, 
behind the tomb of the saint, and commenced a descent of a 
long flight of stone steps. We reached the bottom, and 
found ourselves upon damp ground, following a narrow 
passage, so low, that I was constantly compelled to stoop, 
in the sides of which were numerous small niches of the 
size of a human body. These were the tombs of the early 
Christian martyrs. We saw near a hundred of them. They 
were brought from Rome, the scene of their sufferings, and 
buried in these secret catacombs by the small church of, 
perhaps, the immediate converts of St. Paul and the apostles. 
What food for thought is here, for one who finds more 
interest in the humble traces of the personal followers of 
Christ, who knew his face and had heard his voice, than 
in all the splendid ruins of the works of the persecuting 
emperors of his time ! Most of the bones have been taken 
from their places, and are preserved at the Museum, or 
enclosed in the rich sarcophagi raised to the memory of the 
martyrs in the Catholic churches. Of those that are left 
we saw one. The niche was closed by a thin slab of marble, 
through a crack of which the monk put his slender candle. 
We saw the skeleton as it had fallen from the flesh in decay, 
untouched, perhaps, since the time of our Saviour. 

We passed through several cross-passages, and came to a 
small chamber, excavated simply in the earth, with an 
earthern altar, and antique marble cross above. This was 
the scene of the forbidden worship of the earlv Christians ; 
and before this very cross, which was, perhaps, then newly 



TOMB OF CECILIA METELLA. 77 

selected as the emblem of their faith, met the few dismayed 
followers of the Nazarene, hidden from their persecutors, 
while they breathed their forbidden prayers to their lately 
crucified Master. 

We re-ascended to the light of day by the rough stone 
steps, worn deep by the feet of those who, for ages, for so 
many different reasons, have passed up and down : and, 
taking leave of our capuchin conductor, drove on to the 
next object upon the road — the tomb of Cecilia Metella. 
It stands upon a slight elevation, in the Appian Way, a 
" stern round tower/' with the ivy dropping over its tur- 
rets, and waving from the embrasures, looking more like a 
castle than a tomb. Here was buried " the wealthiest 
Roman's wife," or, according to Corinne, his unmarried 
daughter. It was turned into a fortress by the marauding 
nobles of the thirteenth century, who sallied from this and 
the tomb of Adrian, plundering the ill-defended subjects of 
Pope Innocent IV. till they were taken and hanged from 
the walls by Brancaleone, the Roman senator. It is built 
with prodigious strength. We stooped in passing under the 
low archway, and emerged into the round chamber within 
— a lofty room, open to the sky, in the circular wall of 
which there is a niche for a single body. Nothing could 
exceed the delicacy and fancy with which Childe Harold, 
muses on this spot ; and, feeling that his speculations must 
quite supersede our own, we seated ourselves upon " the 
ivied stone," and perused with increased feelings of delight 

his glorious stanzas. 

****** 

The lofty turrets command a wide view of the Campagna, 
the long aqueducts stretching past at a short distance, and 
forming a chain of noble arches from Rome to the moun- 
tains of Albano. Cole's picture of the Roman Campagna, 
as seen from one of these elevations, is, I think, one of the 
finest landscapes ever painted. 

Just below the tomb of Metella, in a flat valley, lie the 
extensive ruins of what is called the (i Circus of Caracalla" 
by some, and the {C Circus of Romulus " by others — a 
scarcely distinguishable heap of walls and marble, half- 
buried in the earth and moss; and not far off stands a 
beautiful ruin of a small temple dedicated (as some say) to> 



78 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

Ridicule. One smiles to look at it. If the embodying of 
that which is powerful, however, should make a deity, the 
dedication of a temple to Ridicule is far from amiss. In 
our age, particularly, one would think, the lamp should be 
re-lit, and the reviews should repair the temple.^ Poor 
Keats sleeps in his grave scarce a mile from the spot— 
a human victim, sacrificed, not long ago, upon its most 
ruthless altar. 

In the same valley, almost hidden with the luxuriant 
ivy waving before the entrance, flows the lovely fountain of 
Egeria, trickling as clear and musical into its pebbly bed as 
when visited by the enamoured successor of Romulus twenty- 
five centuries ago ! The hill above leans upon the single 
arch of the small temple which embosoms it, and the green 
soft meadow spreads away from the floor, with the brightest 
verdure conceivable. We wound around by a half-worn 
path in descending the hill, and, putting aside the long 
branches of ivy, entered an antique chamber sprinkled with 
quivering spots of sunshine, at the extremity of which, 
upon a kind of altar, lay the broken and defaced statue of 
the nymph. The fountain poured from beneath in two 
streams, as clear as crystal. In the sides of the temple were 
six empty niches, through one of which stole, from a cleft 
in the wall, a little \ stream which had wandered from its 
way. Flowers, pale with growing in the shade, sprang 
from the edges of the rivulet as it wound about ; the small 
creepers, dripping with moisture, hung from between the 
diamond-shaped stones of the roof; the air was refreshingly 
cool ; and the leafy door at the entrance, seen against the 
sky, looked of a transparent green, as vivid as emerald. No 
fancy could create a sweeter spot. The fountain, and the 
inspiration it breathed into Childe Harold, are worthy of 
each other. 

Just above the fountain, on the crest of a hill, stands a 
thick grove, supposed to occupy the place of the consecrated 
wood in which Nuraa met the nymph. It is dark with 
shadow, and full of birds, and might afford a fitting retreat 
for meditation to another king and law-giver. The fields 
about it are so thickly studded with flowers, that you cannot 
step without crushing them, and the whole neighbourhood 
seems a favourite of nature. The rich banker, Torlonia, 



PALM SUNDAY. 7J> 

has bought this and several other classic spots about Rome 
~— possessions for which he is more to be envied than for his 
purchased dukedom. 

All the travelling world assembles at Rome for the cere- 
monies of the holy week. Naples, Florence, and Pisa, send 
their hundreds of annual visitors, and the hotels and palaces 
are crowded with strangers of every nation and rank. It 
would be difficult to imagine a gayer or busier place than 
this usually sombre city has become within a few days. 



LETTER XV. 

PALM SUNDAY SISTINE CHAPEL ENTRANCE OF THE POPE THE 

CHOIR — THE POPE ON HIS THRONE PRESENTING THE PALMS 

PROCESSION — HOLY TUESDAY THE MISERERE ACCIDENTS IN 

THE CROWD — TENEBRJS — THE EMBLEMATIC CANDLES A SOIREE 

HOLY THURSDAY — FRESCOS OF MICHAEL ANGELO — "CREATION 

OF EVE" " LOT INTOXICATED'' DELPHIC SIBYL POPE WASH- 
ING PILGRIMS' FEET POPE AND CARDINALS WAITING UPON 

PILGRIMS AT DINNER. 

March, 1835. 
Palm Sunday opens the ceremonies. We drove to the 
Vatican this morning at nine, and, after waiting a half- 
hour in tbe crush, kept back, at the point of the spear, by 
the pope's Swiss guard, I succeeded in getting an entrance 
into the Sistine chapel. Leaving the ladies of the party 
behind the grate, I passed two more guards, and obtained 
a seat among the cowled and bearded dignitaries of the 
Church and State within, where I could observe the cere- 
mony with ease. 

The pope entered, borne in his gilded chair by twelve 
men, and, at the same moment, the chaunting from the 
Sistine choir commenced with one long, piercing note, by a 
single voice, producing the most impressive effect. He 
mounted his throne as high as the altar opposite him, and 
the cardinals went through their obeisances, one by one, 
their trains supported by their servants, who knelt on the 
lower steps behind theml The palms stood in a tall heap 
beside the altar. They were beautifully woven in wand* 



BO PENCILLIXGS BY THE WAY. 



= 



of perhaps six feet in length, with a cross at the top, Th 
cardinal nearest the papal chair mounted first, and a pal 
was handed him. He laid it across the knees of the pope, 
and, as his Holiness signed the cross upon it, he stooped, 
and kissed the embroidered cross upon his foot, then kissed 
the palm, and, taking it in his two hands, descended with 
it to his seat. The other forty or fifty cardinals did the 
same, until each was provided with a palm. Some twenty 
other persons, monks of apparent clerical rank of every 
order, military men, and members of the Catholic embassies, 
followed and took palms. A procession was then formed, 
the cardinals going first with their palms held before them, 
and the pope following, in his chair, with a small frame of 
palm-work in his hands, in which was woven the initial of 
the Virgin. They passed out of the Sistine chapel, the 
choir chaunting most delightfully, and, having made a tour 
around the vestibule, returned in the same order. 

With all the vast crowd of strangers in Rome, I went 
to the Sistine chapel on Holy Tuesday, to hear the far- 
famed Miserere. It is sung several times during the holy 
week, by the pope's choir, and has been described by travel- 
lers, of all nations, in the most rapturous terms. The vesti- 
bule was the scene of shocking confusion for an hour ; a 
constant struggle going on between the crowd and the 
Swiss guard, amounting occasionally to a fight, in which 
ladies fainted, children screamed, men swore, and, unless by 
force of contrast, the minds of the audience seemed likely 
to be little in tune for the music. The chamberlains at last 
arrived, and two thousand people attempted to get into a 
small chapel which scarce holds four hundred. Coat-skirts, 
torn cassocks, hats, gloves, and fragments of ladies' dresses 
were thrown up by the suffocating throng, and, in the 
midst of a confusion beyond description, the mournful notes 
of the tenebrce (or lamentations of Jeremiah) poured in full 
volume from the choir. Thirteen candles burned in a small 
pyramid within the paling of the altar ; and twelve of these, 
representing the apostles, were extinguished, one by one, 
(to signify their desertion at the cross,) during the singing 
of the tenebrce. The last, which was left burning, repre- 
sented the mother of Christ. As the last before this was 
extinguished, the music ceased. The crowd had, by this 



a soir&e. 81 

time, become quiet. The twilight had deepened through 
the dimly-lit chapel, and the only solitary lamp looked lost 
at the distance of the altar. Suddenly the miserere com- 
menced with one high prolonged note, that sounded like a 
wail ; another joined it, and another and another ; and all 
the different parts came in, with a gradual swell of plaintive 
and most thrilling harmony, to the full power of the choir. 
It continued for perhaps half an hour. The music was 
simple, running jpon a few r notes, like a dirge ; hut there 
were voices in the choir that seemed of a really supernatural 
sweetness. No instrument could he so clear. The crowd, 
even in their uncomfortable positions, were breathless with 
attention, and the effect was universal. 

The candles were lit, and the motley troop of cardinals 
and red-legged servitors passed out. The harlequin-look- 
ing Swiss guard stood to their tall halberds ; the chamber- 
lains and mace-bearers, in their cassocks and frills, took care 
that the males and females should not mix until they reached 
the door ; the pope disappeared in the sacristy ; and the 
gay world, kept an hour beyond their time, went home to 
cold dinners. 

Two or three hours after, I was at a crowded soiree, at 
one of the noble houses of Rome. A prima donna, from 
the Opera, was singing in one room, and card-tables, 
covered with gold and silver, filled three others ; and every 
second player was a dignitary of the church, in dainty 
pumps, and with gold snuff-box and jewelled fingers, com- 
plimenting and flirting with all the bright eyes and merry 
faces around him. The penitential miserere passed through 
my mind and the thick iron grates, through which alone 
ladies are allowed to witness the ceremonies of the chapel. 
I passed on to a pretty silken boudoir, at the end of the 
long suite of apartments, and was welcomed by the hand- 
somest man in Rome — a priest, and the son of a wealthy 
and noble family, who was half-reclining upon the cushions 
of a divan, and playing with the scarf of one of the loveliest 
women of the society here, while two others endeavoured 
to draw him into conversation. I could not help continuing 
my reflection, and contrasting this clerical dandy, with his 
handsome black curls redolent of perfumed oils ; his buckles 
of chased silver; his Parisian gloves ; with a large emerald 



82 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

worn outside, and his attitude and employment of mere 
Measure, with the ministers of a religion professing the 
same Master, in our own country. There are, of course, 
priests in Rome who are sufficiently humble in dress and 
manner, but nothing can exceed the sumptuousnes*s and 
style in which the cardinals live, as well as all who, from 
birth or fortune, have a certain personal consequence. Their 
carriages and horses are the most splendid in the world, 
their large palaces swarm with servants, and their dress has 

all the richness of that of princes when they are abroad. 

****** 

The ceremonies of Holy Thursday commenced with the 
mass in the Sistine chapel. Tired of seeing genuflexions 
and listening to a mumbling of which I could not catch a 
syllable, I took advantage of my privileged seat in the 
ambassador's box, to lean back and study the celebrated 
frescos of Michael Angelo upon the ceiling. A little dra- 
pery would do no harm to any of them. They illustrate, 
mainly, passages of Scripture history, but the " creation of 
Eve," in the centre, is an astonishingly fine representation 
of a naked man and woman, as large as life ; and " Lot 
intoxicated and exposed before his two daughters" is about 
as immodest a picture, from its admirable expression as well 
as its nudity, as could easily be drawn. In one corner 
there is a most beautiful draped figure of the Delphic Sibyl 
—•and I think this bit of heathenism is almost the only 
very decent part of the pope's most consecrated chapel. 

After the mass, the host was carried, with a showy pro- 
cession, to be deposited among the thousand lamps in the 
Capella Paolina ; and, as soon as it had passed, there was a 
general rush for the room in which the pope was to wash 
the feet of the pilgrims. 

Thirteen men, dressed in white, with sandals open at 
the top, and caps of paper covered with white linen, sat on 
a high bench, just under a beautiful copy of the " Last 
Supper" of Da Vinci, in gobelin tapestry. It was a small 
chapel, communicating with the pope's private apartments. 
Eleven of the pilgrims were as vulgar and brutal-looking 
men as could have been found in the world ; but of the 
two in the centre, one was the personification of wild 
fanaticism. He was pale, emaciated, and abstracted. His 



CAPELLA PAOLINA. 83 

hair and beard was neglected, and of a singular blackness. 
His lips were firmly set in an expression of severity. His 
brows were gathered gloomily over his eyes, and his 
glances occasionally sent among the crowd, were as glaring 
and flashing as a tiger's. With all this, his countenance 
was lofty, and if I had seen the face on canvass, as a 
portrait of a martyr, I should have thought it finely ex- 
pressive of courage and devotion. The man on his left 
wept, or pretended to weep, continually ; but every person 
in the room was struck with his extraordinary resemblance 
to Judas, as he is drawn in the famous picture of the Last 
Supper. It was the same marked face, the same treacherous, 
ruffian look, the same style of hair and beard, to a wonder. 
It is possible that lie might have been chosen on purpose, 
the twelve pilgrims being intended to represent the twelve 
apostles, of whom Judas was one — but if accidental, it was 
the most remarkable coincidence that ever came under my 
notice. He looked the hypocrite and traitor complete, and 
his resemblance to the Judas in the picture directly over 
his head would have struck a child. 

The pope soon entered from his apartments, in a purple 
stole, with a cape of dark crimson satin, and the mitre of 
silver cloth ; and, casting the incense into the golden censer, 
the white smoke was flung from side to side before him, till 
the delightful odour filled the room. A short service was 
then chaunted, and the choir sang a hymn. His Holiness 
was then unrobed, and a fine napkin, trimmed with lace* 
was tied about him by the servitors ; and, with a deacon 
before him, bearing a splendid pitcher and basin, and a 
procession behind him, with large bunches of flowers, he 
crossed to the pilgrim's bench. A priest, in a snow-white 
tunic, raised and bared the foot of the first. The pope 
knelt, took water in his hand, and slightly rubbed the 
instep, and then, drying it well with a napkin, he kissed it. 

The assistant-deacon gave a large bunch of flowers and a 
napkin to the pilgrim, as the pope left him ; and another 
person, in rich garments, followed with pieces of money 
presented in a wrapper of white paper. The same ceremony- 
took place with each — one foot only being honoured with a 
lavation. When his Holiness arrived at the u Judas/ 
there was a general stir, and every one was on tip-toe to 



¥A PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

watch his countenance. He took his handkerchief from 
his eyes, and looked at the pope very earnestly ; and, when 
the ceremony was finished, he seized the sacred hand, and 
imprinting a kiss upon it, flung himself hack, and buried 
his face again in his handkerchief, quite overwhelmed with 
his feelings. The other pilgrims took it very coolly, com- 
paratively, and one of them seemed rather amused than 
edified. The pope returned to his throne, and water was 
poured over his hands. A cardinal gave him a napkin, his 
splendid cape was put again over his shoulders, and with a 
pater-noster, the ceremony was over. 

Half an hour after, with much crowding and several 
losses of foot-hold and temper, I had secured a place in the 
hall, where the apostles, as the pilgrims are called, after the 
washing, were to dine, waited on by the pope and cardinals. 
With their gloomy faces and ghastly white caps and white 
dresses, they looked more like criminals waiting for exe- 
cution, than guests at a feast. They stood while the pope 
went round with a gold pitcher and basin, to wash their 
hands ; and then seating themselves, his Holiness, with a 
good-natured smile, gave each a dish of soup, and said 
something in his ear, which had the effect of putting him 
at his ease. The table was magnificently set out with the 
plate and provisions of a prince's table, and, spite of the 
thousands of eyes gazing on them, the pilgrims were soon 
deep in the delicacies cf every dish, even the lachrymose 
Judas himself eating most voraciously. We left them at 
their dessert. 



LETTER XVI. 

Sepulchre of caius cestius — protestant burying ground — 

graves of keats and shelley shelley's lament over 

keats graves of two americans beauty of the burial 

place monuments over two young females — inscription 

on keats* monument the style of keats* poems — 

grave of dr. bell residence and literary under- 
takings of his widow. 

April, 1S35. 

A beautiful pyramid, a hundred and thirteen feet high, 
built into the ancient wall of Rome, is the proud Sepulchre 



PROIESTANT BURIAL-GROUND. 5*5 

of Caius Cestius. It is the most imperishable of the anti- 
quities, standing as perfect after eighteen hundred years as 
if it were built but yesterday Just beyond it, on the de- 
clivity of a hill, over the ridge of which the wall passes, 
crowning it with two mouldering towers, lies the Protestant 
burying-ground. It looks towards Rome, which appears in 
the distance, between Mount Aventine and a small hill 
called Monte Testaccio ; and leaning to the south-east, the 
sun lies warm and soft upon its banks, and the grass and 
wild-flowers are there the earliest and tallest of the Cam- 
pagna. I have been here to-day, to see the graves of Keats 
and Shelley. With a cloudless sky and the most delicious 
air ever breathed, we sat down upon the marble slab laid 
over the ashes of poor Shelley, and read his own lament 
over Keats, who sleeps just below, at the foot of the hilL 
The cemetery is rudely formed into three terraces, with 
walks between ; and Shelley's grave occupies a small nook 
above, made by the projections of a mouldering wall-tower, 
and crowded with ivy and shrubs, and a peculiarly fragrant 
yellow flower, which perfumes the air around for several 
feet. The avenue by which you ascend from the gate is 
lined with high bushes of the marsh-rose in the most 
luxuriant bloom, and all over the cemetery the grass is 
thickly mingled with flowers of every die. In his Preface 
to his lament over Keats, Shelley says, " he was buried in 
the romantic and lonely cemetery of the Protestants, under 
the pyramid which is the tomb of Cestius, and the massy 
walls and towers, now mouldering and desolate, which 
formed the circuit of ancient Rome. It is an open space 
among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. 
It might make one in love with death, to think that one 
should be buried in so sweet a place." If Shelley had 
chosen his own grave at the time, he would have selected 
the very spot where he has since been laid — the most 
sequestered and flowery nook of the place he describes so 
feelingly. In the last verses of the elegy, he speaks of it 
again with the same feeling of its beauty : 

" The spirit of the spot shall lead 
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access, 
Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead, 
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread. 



PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

•' And gray walls moulder round, on which dull tiixx* 
Feeds like slow fire upon a hoary brand ; 
And one keen pyramid, with wedge sublime, 
Pavilioning the dust of him who plann'd 
This refuge for his memory, doth stand 
Like flame transform'd to marble ; and beneath 
A field is spread, on which a newer band 
Have pitch' d, in heaven's smile, their camp of death, 
Welcoming him we lose, with scarce extinguish'd breath. 

" Here pause: these graves are all too young as yet, 
To have outgrown the sorrow which consign' d 
* Its charge to each," 

Shelley has left no poet behind, who could write so 
touchingly of his burial place in turn. He was, indeed, as 
they have graven on his tombstone, " cor cordium * — the 
lieart of hearts. 

On the second terrace of the declivity are ten or twelve 
graves, two of which bear the names of Americans, who 
have died in Rome. A portrait carved in bas-relief, upon 
one of the slabs, told me, without the inscription, that one 
whom I had known was buried beneath. The slightly 
rising mound was covered with small violets, half hidden 
hy the grass. It takes away from the pain with which one 
stands over the grave of an acquaintance or a friend, to see 
the sun lying so warm upon it, and the flowers springing 
so profusely and cheerfully. Nature seems to have cared 
for those who have died so far from home, binding the 
earth gently over them with grass, and decking it with the 
most delicate flowers. 

A little to the left, on the same bank, is the new-made 
grave of a very young man, Mr. Elliot. He came abroad 
for health, and died at Rome, scarce two months since. 
Without being disgusted with life, one feels, in a place like 
this, a certain reconciliation, if I may so express it, with 
a thought of burial — an almost willingness, if his bed could 
be laid amid such loveliness, to be brought and left here to 
his repose. Purely imaginary as any difference in this 
circumstance is, it must at least, always affect the sick 
powerfully ; and with the common practice of sending the 
dying to Italy, as a last hope, I consider the exquisite 
"beauty of this place of burial as more than a common 
accident of happiness. 

Farther on, upon the same terrace, are two monuments 



GRAVES OF ENGLISH. 87 

that interested me. One marks the grave of a young Eng- 
lish girl, the pride of a noble family, and, as a sculptor told 
me, who had often seen and admired her, a model of high- 
born beauty. She was riding with a party on the banks of 
the Tiber, when her horse became unmanageable, and 
backed into the river. She sank instantly, and was swept 
so rapidly away by the current, that her body was not found 
for many months. Her tomb-stone is adorned with a bas- 
relief, representing an angel receiving her from the waves. 

The other is the grave of a young lady of twenty, who 
was at the baths of Lucca, last summer, in pursuit of health. 
She died at the first approach of winter. I had the melan- 
choly pleasure of knowing her slightly, and we used to 
meet her in the winding path upon the bank of the romantic 
river Lima, at evening, borne in a sedan, with her mother 
and sister walking at her side, — the fairest victim con- 
sumption ever seized. She had all the peculiar beauty of 
the disease, the transparent complexion and the unnaturally 
bright eye, added to features cast in the clearest and softest 
mould of female loveliness. She excited general interest 
even among the gay and dissipated crowd of a watering- 
place ; and if her sedan was missed in the evening pro* 
menade, the inquiry for her was anxious and universal. 
She is buried in a place that seems made for such as 
herself. 

We descended to the lower enclosure at the foot of the 
slight declivity. The first grave here is that of Keats. // 
The inscription on his monument runs thus: " This grave 
contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who 
on his death bed, in the bitterness of his heart at the ma- 
licious power of his enemies, desired these words to be en- 
graved on his tomb: here lies one whose name was 
written in water." He died at Rome i n 18 21. Every 
reader knows his history and the cause of his death. Shelley 
says, in the preface to his elegy, (i The savage criticism on 
his poems, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, pro- 
duced, the most violent effect on his susceptible mind : the 
agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood- 
vessel m the lungs ; a rapid consumption ensued, and the 
succeeding acknowledgements, from more candid critics, of 
the true greatness of his powers, were ineffectual to heal 



68 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

the wound thus wantonly inflicted." Keats was, no doubt> 
a poet of very uncommon promise. He had all the wealth 
of genius within him, but he had not learned, before he 
was killed by criticism, the received, and, therefore, the 
best manner of producing it for the eye of the world, Had 
he lived longer, the strength and richness which break 
continually through the affected style of ' Endymion ' and 
* Lamia ' and his other poems, must have formed themselves 
into some noble monuments of his powers. As it is, there 
is not a poet living who could surpass the material of his 
' Endymion ' — a poem, with all its faults, far more full of 
beauties. But this is not the place for criticism. He is 
buried fitly for a poet and sleeps beyond criticism now. 
Peace to his ashes ! 

Close to the grave of Keats is that of Dr. Bell, the 
author of ' Observations on Italy/ This estimable man, 
whose comments on the Fine Arts are, perhaps, as judicious 
and high-toned a3 any ever written, has left behind him, in 
Naples, (where he practised his profession for some years) 
a host of friends, who remember and speak of him as few 
are remembered and spoken of in this changing and crowded 
portion of the world. His widow, who edited his works so 
ably and judiciously, lives still at Naples, and is preparing 
just now a new edition of his book on Italy. Having 
known her, and having heard from her own lips many par- 
ticulars of his life, I felt an additional interest in visiting 
his grave. Both his monument and Keats' s are almost 
buried in the tall flowering clover of this beautiful place. 



LETTER XVII. 

PRESENTATION AT THE PAPAL COURT PILGRIMS GOING TO 

VESPERS — PERFORMANCE OF THE MISERERE TARPEIAN ROCK 

THE FORUM — PALACE OF THE CAESARS — COLISEUM. 

April, 1833. 

I have been presented to the pope this morning, with Mr 
Mayer, of Baltimore. With the latter gentleman, I ar- 
rived rather late, and found that the rest of the party had 
been already received, and that his Holiness was giving 



KEATS's POEMS, 89 

audience, at the moment, to some Russian ladies of rank 
Bishop England, of Charleston, however, was good enough 
to ssnd in once more, and in the course of a few minutes 
the chamberlain-in-waiting announced to us that // Vadre 
Santo would receive us. The ante-room was a picturesque 
and rather peculiar scene. Clusters of priests of different 
rank were scattered about in the corners, dressed in a 
variety of splendid costumes, white, crimson, and ermine ; 
one or two monks, with their picturesque beards and 
flowing dresses of grey or brown, were standing near one of 
the doors, in their habitually humble attitudes ; two gen- 
tlemen mace-bearers guarded the door of the entrance to 
the pope's presence, their silver batons under their arms, 
and their open-breasted cassocks covered with fine lace : the 
deep bend of the window was occupied by an American 
party of ladies, in the required black veils ; and around the 
outer door stood the helmeted guard, a dozen stout men at- 
arms, forming a forcible contrast to the mild faces and 
priestly company within. 

The mace- bearers lifted the curtain, and the pope stood 
before us, in a small plain room. The Irish priest who 
accompanied us prostrated himself on the floor, and kissed 
the embroidered slipper ; and Bishop England hastily 
knelt and kissed his hand, turning to present us as he 
rose. His Holiness smiled, and stepped forward, with 
a gesture of his hand, as if to prevent our kneeling, and, as 
the bishop mentioned our names, he looked at us and 
nodded smilingly, but without speaking to us. Whether he 
presumed we did not speak the language, or whether he 
thought us too young to answer for ourselves, he confined 
his inquiries about us entirely to the good bishop, leaving 
me, as 1 had wished, at leisure to study his features and 
manner. It was easy to conceive that the father of the 
Catholic Church stood before me, but I could scarcely 
realise that it was a sovereign of Europe, and the temporal 
monarch of millions. He was dressed in a long vesture of 
snow-white flannel, buttoned together in front, with a large 
crimson velvet cape over his shoulders, and band and 
tassels of silver cloth hanging from beneath. A small white 
skull-cap covered the crown of his head, and his hair, 
slightly grizzled, fell straight towards a low forehead, ex« 



90 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

pressive of good-nature merely. A large emerald on his 
finger, and slippers wrought in gold, with a cross on the 
instep, completed his dress. His face is heavily moulded, 
but unmarked, and expressive mainly of sloth and kindness ; 
his nose is uncommonly large, rather pendant than'promi- 
nent ; and an incipient double chin, slightly hanging cheeks, 
and eyes, over which the lids drop, as if in sleep, at the 
end of every sentence, confirm the general impression of 
his presence — that of an indolent and good old man. His 
inquiries were principally of the Catholic Church in 
Baltimore, (mentioned by the bishop as the city of Mr. 
Mayer's residence,) of its processions, its degree of state, 
and whether it was recognised by the government. At the 
first pause in the conversation, his Holiness smiled and 
bowed ; the Irish priest prostrated himself again and kissed 
his foot, and with a blessing from the father of the Church, 
we retired. 

Of the three reigning monarchs of Europe to whom I 
bave now been presented, there is not one whose natural 
dignity and personal fitness for his station have impressed 
me, in any degree, like that of our own venerable President. 
I have approached the former through guards and masters 
of ceremony, with all the splendid paraphernalia of regal 
palaces around, themselves in the imposing dress of monarchs, 
standing in the sanctuaries of history and association. I 
called upon the latter without even sending up my name, 
introduced by the son of one of his friends, in the scarce 
finished government-house of a new republic, and found 
him in the midst of his family, hardly recovered from a 
severe illness. The circumstances were all in favour of the 
former, but I think the most bigoted follower of kings 
would find something in the simple manners and stern 
dignity of the grey old " chieftain " that would impress 
him far more than the state of all the monarchs of 
Christendom. 

On the evening of Holy Thursday, as I was on my way 
to St. Peter's to hear the Miserere once more, I overtook 
the procession of the pilgrims going up to vespers. The 
men went first in couples, following a cross, and escorted by 
gentlemen penitents covered conveniently with sackcloth, 
their eyes peeping through two holes, and their well- 



PROCESSION 91 

polished boots beneath, being the only indications by which 
their penance could be betrayed to the world. The pil- 
grims themselves, perhaps a hundred in all, were the dirtiest 
collection of beggars imaginable, distinguished from the 
lazars in the street only by a long staff with a faded bunch 
of flowers attached to it, and an oil-cloth cape stitched over 
with scallop-shells. Behind came the female pilgrims, and 
these were led by the first ladies of rank in Rome. It was 
really curious to see the mixture of humility and pride. 
There were, perhaps, fifty ladies of all ages, from sixteen 
to fifty, walking each between two filthy old women, who 
supported themselves by their arms, while near them, on 
either side of the procession, followed their splendid equi- 
pages, with numerous servants, in livery, on foot, as if to 
contradict to the world their temporary degradation. The 
lady penitents, unlike the gentlemen, walked in their ordi- 
nary dress. The chief penitent, who carried a large, heavy 

crucifix at the head of the procession, was the Princess , 

at whose weekly soirees and balls assemble all that is gay 
and pleasure-loving in Rome. Her two nieces, elegant 
girls of eighteen or twenty, walked at her side, carrying 
lighted candles, of four or five feet in length, in broad day- 
light through the streets ! 

The procession crept slowly up to the church, and I left 
them kneeling at the tomb of St. Peter, and went to the 
side chapel, to listen to the Miserere. The choir here is 
said to be inferior to that in the Sistine chapel, but the cir- 
cumstances more than make up for the difference, which, 
after all, it takes a nice ear to detect. I could not but 
congratulate myself, as I sat down upon the base of a pillar, 
in the vast aisle, without the chapel where the choir were 
chaunting, with the twilight gathering in the lofty arches, 
and the candles of the various processions creeping to the 
consecrated sepulchre from the distant parts of the church. 
It was so different in that crowded and suffocating chapel 
of the Vatican, where, fine as was the music, I vowed posi- 
tively never to subject myself to such annoyance again. 

It had become almost dark, when the last candle but one 
was extinguished in the symbolical pyramid, and the first 
almost painful note of the Miserere wailed out into the vast 
church of St. Peter. For the next half-hour the kneeling 



'92 PENCILLINGS BY THEWAY. 

listeners, around the door of the chapel, seemed spell-bound 
in their motionless attitudes. The darkness thickened ; the 
hundred lamps at the far-off sepulchre of the saint looked 
like a galaxy of twinkling points of fire, almost lost in the 
distance ; and from the now perfectly obscured choir, 
poured, in ever-varying volume, the dirge-like music, in 
notes inconceivably plaintive and affecting. The power ; 
the mingled mournfulness and sweetness ; the impassioned 
fulness, at one moment, and the lost, shrieking wildness of 
one solitary voice, at another, carried away the soul like a 
whirlwind. I never have been so moved by any thing. It 
is not in the scope of language to convey an idea to another 
of the effect of the Miserere. 

It was not till several minutes after the music had ceased, 
that the dark figures rose up from the floor about me. As 
we approached the door of the church, the full moon, about 
three hours risen, poured broadly under the arches of the 
portico, inundating the whole front of the lofty dome with 
a flood of light such as falls only on Italy. There seemed 
to be no atmosphere between. Daylight is scarce more 
intense. The immense square, with its slender obelisk 
and embracing crescents of colonnade, lay spread out as 
definitely to the eye as at noon ; and the two famous foun- 
tains shot up their clear waters to the sky, the moonlight 
streaming through the spray, and every drop as visible and 
bright as a diamond. 

I got out of the press of carriages, and took a by -"street 
^ilong the Tiber, to the Coliseum. Passing the Jews' quar- 
ter, which shuts at dark by heavy gates, I found myself 
near the Tarpeian Rock, and entered the Forum, behind 
the ruins of the Temple of Fortune. I walked toward the 
palace of the Csesars, stopping to gaze on the columns, whose 
shadows had fallen on the same spot, where I now saw them, 
for sixteen or seventeen centuries. It checks the blood at 
one's heart, to stand on the spot and remember it. There 
was not the sound of a footstep through the whole wilder- 
ness of the Forum. I traversed it to the arch of Titus in a 
silence, which, with the majestic ruins around, seemed 
almost supernatural— the mind was left so absolutely to 
the powerful associations of the place. 

Ten minutes more brought me to the Coliseum. Its 



COLISEUM. flS"* 

gigantic walls, arches on arches, almost to the very clouds, 
lay half in shadow, half in light ; the ivy hung trembling 
in the night air, from between the cracks of the ruin, and 
it looked like some mighty wreck in a desert. I entered, 
and a hundred voices announced to me the presence of half 
the fashion of Rome. I had forgotten that it was the mode 
<e to go to the Coliseum by moonlight/' Here they were 
dancing and laughing about the arena, where thousands of 
Christians had been torn by wild beasts for the amusement 
of the emperors of Rome ; where gladiators had fought and 
died : where the sands beneath their feet were more elo- 
quent of blood than any other spot on the face of the earth. 
— and one sweet voice proposed a dance, and another wished 
she could have music and supper; and the solemn old- 
arches re-echoed with shouts and laughter. The travestie 
of the thing was amusing. I mingled in the crowd , and 
found acquaintances of every nation; and an hour I had 
devoted to romantic solitude and thought passed away per- 
haps quite as agreeably, in the nonsense of the most thought- 
less triflers in society. 



LETTER XVIII. 



VIGILS OVER THE HOST — CEREMONIES OF EASTER SUNDAY — THE: 

PROCESSION HIGH MASS THE POPE BLESSING THE PEOPLE 

CURIOUS ILLUMINATION RETURN TO FLORENCE RURAL FESTA.. 

HOSPITALITY OF THE FLORENTINES EXPECTED MARRIAGE- 

OF THE GRAND DUKE. 

April, 1853. 

This is Friday of the holy week. The host which was 
deposited yesterday amid its thousand lamps in the Paoline 
chapel, was taken from its place this morning, in solemn 
procession, and carried back to the Sistine, after lying in 
the consecrated place twenty four hours. Vigils were kept 
over it all night. The Paoline chapel has no windows, 
and the lights are so disposed as to multiply its receding 
arches till the eye is lost in them. The altar on which 
the host lay was piled up to the roof in a pyramid of light ; 
find with the prostrate figures constantly covering the floor, 



94 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

and the motionless soldier in antique armour at the en- 
trance, it was like some scene of wild romance. 

****** 

The ceremonies of Easter Sunday were performed where 
all the others should have heen — in the body of St. Peter's. 
Two lines of soldiers, forming an aisle up the centre, 
stretched from the square without the portico to the sacred 
sepulchre. Two temporary platforms for the various diplo- 
matic corps and other privileged persons occupied the sides, 
and the remainder of the church was filled by thousands of 
strangers, Roman peasantry, and contadini (in picturesque 
red bodices, and with golden bodkins through their hair,) 
from all the neighbouring towns. 

A loud blast of trumpets, followed by military music, 
announced the coming of the procession. The two long 
lines of soldiers presented arms, and the esquires of the 
pope entered first, in red robes, followed by the long train 
of proctors, chamberlains, mitre-bearers, and incense- 
bearers ; the men-at-arms escorting the procession on either 
side. Just before the cardinals, came a cross-bearer, sup- 
ported on either side by men in showy surplices carrying 
lights, and then came the long and brilliant line of white- 
headed cardinals, in scarlet and ermine. The military dig- 
nitaries of the monarch preceded the pope — a splendid mass 
of uniforms ; and his Holiness then appeared, supported in 
his great gold and velvet chair, upon the shoulders of twelve 
men, clothed in red damask, with a canopy over his head, 
sustained by eight gentlemen, in short violet-coloured silk 
mantles. Six of the Swiss guard (representing the six Ca- 
tholic cantons) walked near the pope, with drawn swords 
on their shoulders, and after his chair followed a troop of 
«ivil officers, whose appointments I did not think it worth 
while to inquire, The procession stopped when the pope 
was opposite the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament, and his 
Holiness descended. The tiara was lifted from his head by 
n cardinal, and he knelt upon a cushion of velvet and gold 
to adore the " sacred host," which was exposed upon the 
altar. After a few minutes he returned to his chair, his 
tiara was again set on his head, and the music rang out 
anew, while the procession swept on to the sepulchre. 

The spectacle was all splendour. The clear space through 



HIGH MASS. 95 

the vast area of the church, lined with glittering soldiery ; 
the dazzling gold and crimson of the coming procession ; 
the high papal chair, with the immense fan-banners of 
peacocks' feathers held aloft ; the almost immeasurable 
dome and mighty pillars above and around, and the multi- 
tudes of silent people, produced a scene which, connected 
with the idea of religious worship, and added to by the 
swell of a hundred instruments of music, quite dazzled and 
overpowered me. 

The high mass (performed but three times a year) pro- 
ceeded. At the latter part of it, the pope mounted to the 
altar, and, after various ceremonies, elevated the sacred 
host. At the instant that the small white wafer was seen 
between the golden candlesticks, the two immense lines of 
soldiers dropped upon their knees, and all the people pro- 
strated themselves at the same instant. 

This fine scene over, we hurried to the square in front of 
the church, to secure places for a still finer one — that of the 
pope blessing the people. Several thousand troops, cavalry 
and foot-men, were drawn up between the steps and the 
obelisk, in the centre of the piazza ; and the immense area 
embraced by the two circling colonnades was crowded by, 
perhaps a hundred thousand people, with eyes directed to 
one single point. The variety of bright costumes, the gay 
liveries of the ambassadors' and cardinals' carriages, the vast 
body of soldiery, and the magnificent frame of columns and 
fountains in which this gorgeous picture was contained, 
formed the grandest scene conceivable* In a few minutes 
the pope appeared in the balcony over the great door of St. 
Peter's. Every hat in the vast multitude was lifted and 
every knee bowed in an instant ; — half a nation prostrate 
together, and one gray old man lifting up his hands to 
Heaven, and blessing them ! 

The cannon of the Castle of St. Angelo thundered ; the 
innumerable bells of Rome pealed forth simultaneously; 
the troops fell into line and motion, and the children of the 
two hundred and fifty- seventh successor of St. Peter de- 
parted blessed. 

In the evening all the world assembled to see the illu- 
mination, which it is useless to attempt to describe. The 
night was cloudy ap* 3 black, and every line in the architec- 



96 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

ture of the largest building in the world was defined in 
tight, even to the cross, which, as I have said before, is at 
the height of a mountain from the base. For about an hour 
it was a delicate but vast structure of shining lines, like the 
drawing of a glorious temple on the clouds. At eight, as 
the clock struck, flakes of fire burst from every point, and 
the whole building seemed started into flame. It was done 
by a simultaneous kindling of torches in a thousand points, 
& man stationed at each. The glare seemed to exceed that 
of noonday. No description can give an idea of it. 

I am not sure that I have not been a little tedious in 
describing the ceremonies of the holy week. Forsyth says, 
in his bilious book, that he "never could read, and certainly 
never could write, a description of them." They have struck 
me, however, as particularly unlike any thing ever seen in 
my own country, and I have endeavoured to draw them 
slightly and with as little particularity as possible. 



I found myself at six this morning, where I had found 
myself at the same hour a year before — in the midst of the 
rural festa in the Cascine of Florence. The duke, to-day, 
breakfasts at his farm. The people of Florence, high and 
low, come out, and spread their repasts upon the fine sward 
of the openings in the wood ; the roads are watered ; and 
the royal equipages dash backward and forward, while the 
ladies hang their shawls in the trees, and children and 
lovers stroll away into the shade, and all looks like a scene 
from Boccaccio. 

I thought it a picturesque and beautiful sight last year, 
and so described it. But I was a stranger then, newly 
arrived in Florence, and felt desolate amid the happiness of 
so many. A few months among so frank and warm-hearted 
a people as the Tuscans, however, makes one at home. 
The tradesman and his wife, familiar with your face, and 
happy to be seen in their holiday dresses, give you the 
" buon giorno " as you pass, and a cup of red wine or a seat 
at the cloth on the grass is at your service in almost any 
group in the prato. I am sure I should not find so many 
acquaintances in the town in which I have passed my life. 

A little beyond the crowd lies a broad open glade of the 



THE GRAND DUKE 97 

greenest grass, in the very centre of the woods of the farm. 
A broad fringe of shade is flung by the trees along the 
eastern side, and at their roots cluster the different parties 
of the nobles and the ambassadors. Their gaily-dressed 
chasseurs are in waiting ; the silver plate quivers and 
glances, as the chance rays of the sun break through the 
leaves overhead ; and at a little distance in the road stand 
their showy equipages in a long line from the great oak to 
the farm-house. 

In the evening there was an illumination of the green 
alleys and the little square in front of the house, and a 
band of music for the people. Within, the halls were 
thrown open for a ball. It was given by the Grand Duke 
to the Duchess of Lichtenberg, the widow of Eugene 
Beauharnais. The company assembled at eight, and the 
presentations (two lovely countrywomen of my own among 
them) were over at nine. The dancing then commenced, 
and we drove home, through the fading lights still burning 
in the trees, an hour or two past midnight. 

The Grand Duke is about to be married to one of the 
princesses of Naples, and great preparations are making for 
the event. He looks little like a bridegroom, with his sad 
face, and unshorn beard and hair. It is, probably, not a 
marriage of inclination, for the fat princess expecting him 
is every way inferior to the incomparable woman he has 
lost, and he passed half the last week in a lonely visit to the 
chamber in which she died, in his palace at Pisa. 



LETTER XIX. 
PISA. 

DULNESS OF THE TOWN LEANING TOWER — CRUISE IN THE FRIGATE 

" UNITED STATES' 7 ELBA PIOMBINO PORTO FERRAJO AP- 
PEARANCE OF THE BAY NAVAL DISCIPLINE VISIT TO THE 

TOWN-RESIDENCE OF NAPOLEON HIS EMPLOYMENT DURING HIS 

CONFINEMENT ON THE ISLAND — HIS SISTERS ELIZA AND PAULINE 

HIS COUNTRY-HOUSE SIMPLICITY OF THE INHABITANTS OF 

ELBA. 

May 29, 1833. 

I left Florence on one of the last days of May for Pisa, 
with three Italian companions, who subraitted as quietly a 

H 



98 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

myself to being sold four times from one vetturino to an- 
other, at the different stopping places, and we drove into 
the grass-grown, melancholy streets of Pisa, in the middle 
of the afternoon, thankful to escape from the heat and dust 
of the low banks of the Arno. My fellow-travellers were 
.Florentines, and in their sarcastic remarks upon the dulness 
of Pisa I imagined I could detect a lingering trace of the 
ancient hatred of these once rival republics. Preparations 
for the illumination in honour of the new Grand Duchess 
were going on upon the streets bordering the river, but 
other sign of life there was none. It must have been soli- 
tude itself which tempted Byron to reside in Pisa. I looked 
at the hot sunny front of the Palazzo Lanfranchi in which 
he lived, and tried in vain to imagine it the home of any 
thing in the shape of pleasure. 

I hurried to dine with the friends whose invitation had 
brought me out of my way, (I was going to Leghorn,) and 
with a warm, golden sunset flushing in the sky, we left the 
table a few hours after, to mount to the top of the " leaning 
tower." On the north and east lay the sharp terminating 
ridges of the Appenines, in which lay nested Lucca and its 
gay Baths, and on the west and south, overlTbroad bright 
green meadow of from seven to fourteen miles, threaded by 
the Arno and the Serchio , coiled the distant line of the 
Mediterranean, peaked with the many ships entering and 
leaving the busy port of Leghorn, and gilded, like a flaunt- 
ing ribbon, with the gold of the setting sun. Below us lay 
Pisa, and away to the mountains, and off over the plains, 
the fertile farms of Tuscany. Every point of the scene 
was lovely. But there was an unaccustomed feature in the 
southern view, which had more power over my feelings 
than all else around me. Floating like small clouds in the 
distance, I could just distinguish two noble frigates, lying 
at anchor in the roads. The guardian of the tower handed 
me his glass, and I strained my eye till I fancied I could 
see the " stars and stripes" of my country's flag flying at 
the peaks. I pointed them out with pride to my English 
friends ; and while they hung over the dizzy railing, 
watching the fading tints of the sunset on the mountains 
of Tuscany, I kept my eye on the distant ships, lost in a 
thousand reveries of home. The blood so stirs to see that 
free banner in a foreign land ! 



THE CRUISE. 99 

We remained on the tower till the .moon rose clear and 
full, and then descended by its circling galleries to the 
square, looked at the tall fairy structure in her mellower 
light, its sides laced with the shadows of the hundred 
columns winding around it, and the wondrous pile, as it 
leaned forward to meet the light, seeming in the very act of 

toppling to the earth. 

' " # * * * * * 

I had come from Florence to join the " United States," 
at the polite invitation of the officers of the ward-room, on 
a cruise up the Mediterranean. My cot was swung imme- 
diately on my arrival, but we lay three days longer than, 
was expected in the harbour, riding out a gale of wind, 
which broke the chain-cables of both ships, and drove several 
merchant- vessels on the rocks. We got under weigh on the 
third of June, and the next morning were off Elba, with 
Corsica on our quarter, and the little island of Capreja just 
a-head. 

The firing of guns took me just now to the deck. Three 
Sardinian gun-boats had saluted the commodore's flag in 
passing, and it was returned with twelve guns. They were 
coming home from the affair at Tunis. It is a fresh, 
charming morning, and we are beating up against a light 
head- wind ; all the officers on deck looking at the island 
with their glasses, and discussing the character of the great 
man to whom this little barren spot was a temporary em- 
pire. A bold fortification just appears on the point, with 
the Tuscan flag flying from the staff. The sides of the 
hills are dotted with desolate-looking buildings, among which 
are one or two monasteries : and in rounding the side of 
the island, we have passed two or three small villages, 
perched below and above on the rocks. Off to the east, 
we can just distinguish Piombino, the nearest town of the 
Italian shore; and very beautiful it looks, rising from the 
edge of the water like Venice, with a range of cloudy hills 
relieving it in the rear. 

Our anchor is dropped in the bay of Porto Ferrajo. 
As we ran lightly in upon the last tack, the walls of the 
fort appeared crowded with people, the whole town ap- 
parently assembled to see the unusual spectacle of two 
ships-of-war entering their now quiet waters: A small 

h 2 



100 PENCILL1NGS BY THE WAY. 

curving bay opened to us, and as we rounded directly 
under the walls of the fort, the tops of the houses in the 
town behind appeared crowded with women, whose features 
we could easily distinguish with a glass. By the constant 
exclamations of the midshipmen, who were gazing intently 
from the quarter-deck, there was among them a fair pro- 
portion of beauty, or what looked like it in the distance. 
Just below the summit of the fort, upon a terrace com- 
manding a view of the sea, stood a handsome house, with 
low windows shut with Venetian blinds and shaded with 
acacias, which the pilot pointed out to us as having been the 
town-residence of Napoleon. As the ship lost her way, 
we came in sight of a gentle amphitheatre of hills rising 
away from the cove, in a woody ravine of which stood a 
liandsome building, with eight windows, built by the Exile 
as a country-house. Twenty or thirty, as good or better,, 
spot the hills around, ornamented with avenues and orchards 
of low olive trees. It is altogether a rural scene, and dis- 
appoints us agreeably after the barren promise of the outer 
sides of the isle. 

The " Constellation " came slowly in after us, with every 
sail set, and her tops crowded with men ; and as she fell 
under the stern of the commodore's ship, the word was 
given, and her vast quantity of sail was furled with that 
wonderful alacrity which so astonishes a landsman. I have 
teen continually surprised in the few days that I have been 
on board, with the wonders of sea-discipline ; but for a> 
spectacle, I have seen nothing more imposing than the 
entrance of these two beautiful frigates into the little port 
of Elba, and their magical management. The anchors were 
dropped, the yards came down by the run, the sails disap- 
peared, the living swarm upon the rigging slid below, all in a 
moment, and then struck up the delightful band on our 
quarter-deck, and the sailors leaned on the guns, the officers 
on the quarter railing, and boats from the shore filled with 
ladies lay off at different distances, — the whole scene as full 
of repose and enjoyment, as if we had lain idle for a month, 
in these glassy waters. How beautiful are the results of 

order ! 

# * * * * 

We had made every preparation for a pic-nic party to the 



TOWN-HOUSE OF NAPOLEON. 101 

country-house of Napoleon yesterday — but it rained. At 
sunset, however, the clouds crowded into vast masses, and 
the evening gave a glorious promise, which was fulfilled 
this morning in freshness and sunshine. The commodore's 
barge took off the ladies for an excursion on horseback 
to the iron-mines, on the other side of the island — the 
midshipmen were set ashore in various directions for a ramble; 
and I, tempted with the beauty of the ravine which encloses 
the villa of Napoleon, declined all invitations, with an eye 
to a stroll thither. 

We were first set ashore at the mole to see the town. A 
medley crowd of soldiers, citizens, boy*, girls, and galley- 
slaves, received us at the landing, and followed us up to the 
town-square, gazing at the officers with undisguised 
curiosity. We met several gentlemen from the other ship 
at the cafe, and, -taking a cicerone together started for the 
town residence of the Emperor. It is now occupied by the 
governor, and stands on the summit of the little fortified 
city. We mounted by clean excellent pavements, getting a 
good-natured " buon giorno" from every female head 
thrust from beneath the blinds of the houses. The governor's 
Aid received us at the door, with his cap in his hand, and 
we commenced the tour of the rooms, with all the house- 
hold, male and female, following to gaze at us. Napoleon 
lived on the first floor. The rooms were as small as those 
of a private house, and painted in the pretty fresco common 
in Italy. The furniture was all changed, and the fire-places 
and two busts of the Emperor's sisters (Eliza and Pauline) 
were all that remained as it was. The library is a pretty 
room, though very small, and opens on a terrace level with 
his favourite garden. The plants and lemon-trees were 
planted by himself, we were told, and the officers plucked 
souvenirs on all sides. The officer who accompanied us was 
an old soldier of Napoleon's and a native of Elba, and after 
a little of the reluctance common to the teller of an oft- told 
tale, he gave us some interesting particulars of the Emperor's 
residence at the island. It appears that he employed him- 
self, from the first day of his arrival, in the improvement 
of his little territory, making roads, &c, and behaved quite 
like a man who had made up his mind to relinquish am. 
bition, and content himself with w r hat was about hinu 



102 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

Three assassins were discovered and captured in the course 
of the eleven months, the two first of whom he pardoned. 
The third made an attempt upon his life, in the disguise of 
a beggar, at a bridge leading to his country-house, and was 
condemned and executed. He was a native of the Em- 
peror's own birth-place in Corsica. The second-floor was 
occupied by his mother and Pauline. The furniture of the 
chamber of the renowned beauty is very much as she left it. 
The bed is small, and the mirror opposite its foot very 
large and in a mahogany frame. Small mirrors were set 
also into the bureau, and in the back of a pretty cabinet of 
dark wood standing at the head of the bed. It is delightful 
to breathe the atmosphere of a room that has been the 
liome of the lovely creature whose marble image by Canova 
thrills every beholder with love. Her sitting-room, though 
less interesting, made us linger and muse again. It looks 
out over the sea to the west, and the prospect is beautiful. 
One forgets that her history could not be written without 
many a blot. How much we forgive to beauty ! Of all 
the female branches of the Bonaparte family, Pauline bore 
the greatest resemblance to her brother Napoleon. But the 
grand and regular profile which was in him marked with, 
the stern air of sovereignty and despotic rule, was in her 
tempered with an enchanting softness and fascinating smile. 
Her statue is the chefd' ceuvre of modern sculpture. 

We went from the Governors house to the walls of the 
town loitering along and gazing at the sea, and then 
rambled through the narrow streets of the town, attracting, 
by the gay uniforms of the officers, the attention and 
courtesies of every smooched petticoat far and near. What 
the faces of the damsels of Elba might be, if washed, we 
could hardly form a conjecture. 

The country-house of Napoleon is three miles from the 
town, a little distance from the shore, farther round into 
the bay. Captain Nicholson proposed to walk to it, and 
send his boat across — a warmer task for the mid-day of an 
Italian June than a man of less enterprise would choose for 
pleasure. We reached the stone steps of the imperial casino, 
after a melting and toilsome walk, hungry and thirsty, and 
were happy to fling ourselves upon broken chairs in the 
denuded drawing-room, and wait for an extempore dinner 



napoleon's country-house. 103 

of twelve eggs and a bottle of wine as bitter as criticism. 
A farmer and his family live in the house, and a couple of 
bad busts and the fire-places are all that remain of its old 
appearance. The situation and the view, however, are 
superb. A little lap of a valley opens right away from the 
door to the bosom of the bay, and in the midst of the glassy 
basin lies the bold peninsular promontory and fortification 
of Porto Ferrajo, like a castle in a loch, connected w th the 
body of the island by a mere rib of sand. Off beyond sleeps 
the mainland of Italy, mountain and vale, like a smoothly- 
shaped bed of clouds ; and for the foreground of the land- 
scape, the valleys of Elba are just now green with fig-trees 
and vines, speckled here and there with fields of golden 
grain, and farm-houses shaded with all the trees of this 
genial climate. 

We examined the place after our frugal dinner, and 
found a natural path under the edge of the hill behind, 
stretching away back into the valley, and leading, after 
a short walk, to a small stream and a waterfall. Across it, 
just above the fall, lay the trunk of an old and vigorous fig- 
tree, full of green limbs, and laden with fruit half-ripe. 
It made a natural bridge over the stream, and as its branches 
shaded the rocks below, we could easily imagine Napoleon 
walking to and fro in the smooth path, and seating himself 
on the broadest stone in the heat of the summer evenings 
he passed on the spot. It was the only walk about the 
place, and a secluded and pleasant one. The groves of firs 
and brush above, and the locust and cherry-trees on the 
edges of the walk, are old enough to have shaded him. We 
sat and talked under the influence of the " genius of the 
spot" till near sunset, and then, cutting each a walking- 
stick from the shoots of the old fig-tree, returned to the 
boats and reached the ship as the band struck up their ex- 
hilarating music for the evening on the quarter-deck. 
****** 

W T e passed two or three days at Elba most agreeably. 
The weather has been fine, and the ships have been 
thronged with company. The common-people of the town 
came on board in boat-loads — men, women, and children— 
and are never satisfied with gazing and wondering. The 
inhabitants speak very pure Tuscan, and are mild and 



104* PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

simple in their manners. They all take the ships to be 
bound upon a mere voyage of pleasure ; and with the 
officers in their gay dresses, and the sailors in their clean 
white and blue, the music, morning and evening, and the 
general gaiety on board, the impression is not much' to be 
wondered at. 

Yesterday, after dinner, Captain Nicholson took us ashore 
in his gig to pass an hour or two in the shade. His steward 
followed, with a bottle or two of old wine; and landing 
near the fountain to which the boats are sent for water, we 
soon found a spreading fig-tree, and, with a family of the 
country people from a neighbouring cottage around us, we 
idled away the hours till the cool of the evening. The 
simplicity of the old man and his wife, and the wonder of 
himself and several labourers in his vineyard, to whom the 
captain gave a glass or two of his excellent wines, would 
have made a study for Wilkie. Sailors are merry com- 
panions for a party like this. We returned over the un- 
ruffled expanse of the bay, charmed with the beauty of the 
scene by sunset, and as happy as a life, literally sans souci> 
could make us. What is it, in this rambling absence from 
all to which we look forward in love and hope, that so 

fascinates the imagination ? 

****** 

I went, in the commodore s suite, to call upon the 
governor this morning. He is a military, commanding- 
looking man, and received us in Napoleon's saloon, sur- 
rounded by his officers. He regretted that his commission 
did not permit him to leave the shore, even to visit the ship, 
but offered a visit on the part of his sister and a company 
of the first ladies of the town. They came off this evening. 
She was a lady-like woman, not very pretty, of thirty years 
perhaps. As she spoke only Italian, she was handed over 
to me, and I waited on her through the ship, explaining a 
great many things, of which I knew as much as herself. 
This visit over, we get under weigh to-morrow morning for 
Naples. 



1SCHIA. 105 



LETTER XX. 

DEPARTURE FROM ELBA ISCHIA— BAY OF NAPLES — NAPLES 

SAN CARLO — REPEATED CONSPIRACIES SCENE ON SHIPBOARD 

CASTE LLAMA RE. 

June 3, 1833. 

We set sail from Elba on the morning of the third of 
June. The inhabitants, all of whom I presume had been 
on board of the ships, were standing along the walls and 
looking from the embrasures of the fortress to see us off. 
It was a clear summer's morning, without much wind, and 
we crept slowly off from the point, gazing up at the windows 
of Napoleon's house as we passed under, and laying on our 
course for the shore of Italy. We soon got into the freshe* 
breeze of the open sea ; and the low white line of villages on 
the Tuscan coast appeared more distant, till, with a glass* 
we could see the people at the windows watching our pro- 
gress. Fishing-boats were drawn up on shore, and the idle 
sailors were leaning in the half shadow which they afforded ; 
but with the almost total absence of trees, and the glaring 
white of the walls, we were content to be out upon the cool 
sea, passing town after town unvisited. Island after island 
was approached and left during the day ; barren rocks, with 
only a lighthouse to redeem their nakedness ; and in the 
evening at sunset we were in sight of Ischia, the towering 
isle in the bosom of the bay of Naples. The band had been 
called as usual at seven, and were playing a delightful 
waltz upon the quarter-deck; the sea was even, and just 
crisped by the breeze from the Italian shore ; the sailors 
were leaning on the guns, listening ; the officers clustered 
in their various places; and the murmur of the foam before 
the prow was just audible in the lighter passages of the 
music. Above and in the west glowed the eternal but 
untiring tints of the summer sky of the Mediterranean — a 
gradually fading gold from the edge of the sea to the zenith, 
and the early star soon twinkled through it, and the air 
dampened to a reviving freshness. I do not know that a 
mere scene like this, without incident, will interest a reader, 
but it was so delightful to myself, that I have described it 
for the mere pleasure of dwells on it. The desert still* 



106 . PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

ness and loneliness of the sea, the silent motion of the ship, 
and the delightful music swelling beyond the bulwarks and 
dying upon the wind, were such singularly combined cir- 
cumstances ! It was a moving paradise in the waste of the 

ocean. 

•* # * * * 

Sail was shortned last night, and we lay to under tlie 
shore of Ischia, to enter the bay of Naples by daylight. As 
the morning mist lifted a little, the peculiar shape of 
Vesuvius, the boldness of the island of Capri, the sweeping 
curves of Baiae and Portici, and the small promontory 
which lifts Naples toward the sea, rose like the features of 
a familiar friend to my eye. It would be difficult to have 
seen Naples without having a memory steeped in its beauty. 
A fair wind set us straight into the bay ; and, one by one, 
the towns on its shore, the streaks of lava on the sides of 
its volcano, and soon after, the houses of friends on the 
street of the Chiaga, became distinguishable to the eye. 
There had been a slight eruption since I was here ; but 
now, as before, there was scarce a puff of smoke to be seen 
rising from Vesuvius. My little specimen of sulphur, which 
I took from the just-hardened bosom of the crater now de- 
stroyed, lies before me on the table as I write, more valued 
than ever, since its bed has been melted and blown into the 
air. The new and lighter-coloured streak on the right of the 
mountain would have informed me of itself that the lava 
had issued since I was here. The sound of bells and the 
bum of the city reached our ears, and, running in between 
the mole and the castle, the anchor was dropped, and the 

ship surrounded with boats from the shore. 

***** 

The heat kept us on board till the evening, and with 
several of the officers I landed and walked up the Toledo as 
the lazzaroni were stirring from their sleep under the walls 
of the houses. With the exception of the absence of the 
English, who have mostly flitted to the baths, Naples was 
the same place as ever — crowded, busy, dirty, and gay. 
Her thousand beggars were still " dying of hunger," and 
telling it to the passenger in the same exhausted tone ; her 
gay carriages and skeleton hacks were still flying up and 
down, and dashing at and over you for your custom ; the 



NAPLES. 107 

•ows and goats were driven about to be milked in the 
street ; the lemonade-sellers stood in their stalls, the money- 
changers at their tables in the open squares ; puncinello 
squeaked and beat his mistress at every corner ; the awnings 
of the cafes covered hundreds of smokers and loungers 5 
and this gay, miserable, homeless, out-of-doors people, 
seemed as degraded and thoughtless, and, it must be owned, 
as insensibly bappy, as before. You would think, to walk 
through the Toledo of Naples, that two-thirds of its crowd 
of wretches, and all its horses and dogs, were at their last 
extremity ; and yet they go on, and, I was told by an 
Englishman resident here, who has become accustomed 
to meet always the same faces, seem never to change 
or disappear, suffering and groaning and dragging up and 
down, shocking the eye and sickening the heart of the in- 
experienced stranger for years and years. 

We passed the prima sera, the first pait of the evening, 
as most men in Italy pass it, eating ices at the thronged 
cafe, and at nine we went to the splendid theatre of San 
Carlo to see La Sornnambula. The king and queen were 
present, with the queen-mother. I was instantly struck 
with the alteration in the appearance of the young queen. 
When I was here three months ago, she was just married, 
and appeared frequently in the public walks, — and a fresher 
or brighter face I never had seen. She was acknowledged 
the most beautiful woman in Naples, and had, what is very 
much valued in this land of pale brunettes, a clear rosy 
cheek, and lips as bright as a child's. She is now thin and 
white, and looks to me like a person fading with a rapid 
consumption. I found some Italian acquaintances in look- 
ing round the house, and soon learned in whispers the 
news of the day, most of which depended on this circum- 
stance. 

****** 

Several conspiracies have been detected within a month 
or two, the last of which was very nearly successful. The 
day before we arrived, two officers in the royal army, men 
of high rank, had shot themselves, each putting a pistol to 
the other's breast, believing discovery inevitable. One died 
instantly, and the other lingers to-day, without any hope 
of recovery. The king was fired at on parade the day pre- 



108 PEXCILLINGS 3Y THE WAY. 

vious, which was supposed to have been the first step, but 
the plot had been checked by partial disclosure, and hence 
the tragedy I have just related. 

The ships have been thronged with visitors during the 
two or three days we have lain at Naples, amorfg whom 
have been the prime minister and his family. Orders are 
given to admit every one on board that wishes to come ; 
and the decks, morning and evening, present the most 
motley scene imaginable. Cameo and lava sellers expose 
their wares on the gun-carriages, surrounded by midship- 
men — Jews and fruit-sellers hail the sailors through the 
ports — boats full of chickens and pigs, all in loud outcry, 
are held up to view with a recommendation in broken 
English — contadini in their best dresses walk up and down, 
smiling on the officers and wondering at the cleanliness of 
the decks, and the elegance of the captain's cabin — Punch 
plays his tricks under the gun-deck ports — bands of wan- 
dering musicians sing and hold out their hats, as they row 
around, and all is harmony and amusement. In the even- 
ing it is pleasanter still, for the band is playing, and the 
better classes of people come off from the shore, and boats 
filled with these pretty dark-eyed Neapolitans row round 
and round the ship, eyeing the officers as they lean over the 
bulwarks, and ready with but half a nod to make acquaint- 
ance and come up the gangway. I have had a private 
pride of my own in showing the frigate as American to 
many of my foreign friends. One's nationality becomes 
nervously sensitive abroad ; and in the beauty and order 
of the ships, the manly elegance of the officers, and the 
general air of superiority and decision throughout, I have 
found food for some of the highest feelings of gratification 

of which I am capable. 

***** * 

We w T eighed anchor yesterday morning (the twentieth 
of June,) and stood across the bay for Castellamare. Run- 
ning close un er Vesuvius, we passed Portici, Torre del 
*Greco, and Pompeii, and rounded-to in the little harbour 
of this fashionable watering-place soon after noon. Castel- 
lamare is about fifteen miles from Naples, and in the sum- 
mer months it is crowded with those of the fashionables 
who do not make a northern tour. The shore rises directly 



CASTELLAMARE. 100 

from the sea into a high mountain, on the side of which the 
king has a country-seat, and around it hang, on terraces, 
the houses of the English. Strong mineral springs abound 
on the slope. 

We landed directly, and, mounting the donkeys waiting 
on the pier, started to make the round of the village-walks. 
English maids with their prettily-dressed and rosy children, 
and English ladies and gentlemen, mounted like ourselves 
on donkeys, met us at every turn as we wound up the shady 
and zig-zag roads to the palace. The views became finer 
as we ascended, till we could ]ook down into Pompeii, 
which was but four miles off, and away towards Naples, 
following the white road with the eye along the shore of 
the sea. The paths were in fine order, and as beautiful as 
green trees and shade and living fountains, crossing the 
road continually, could make them. In the neighbourhood 
of the royal casino the ground was planted more like a park, 
and the walks were terminated with artificial fountains, 
throwing up their bright waters amid statuary and over 
grottos; and here we met the idlers of the place of all 
nations, enjoying the sunset. I met an acquaintance or 
two, and felt the yearning unwillingness to go away which 
I have felt on every spot almost of this delicious land. 

We set sail again with the night-breeze, and at this 
moment are passing between Ischia and Capri, running 
nearly on our course for Sicily. We shall probably be at 
Palermo to-morrow. The snip's bell beats ten, and the 
lights are ordered out, and, under this imperative govern- 
ment, I must say, " Good night V 



LETTER XXT. 

ISLAND OF SICILY PALERMO SARACENIC APPEARANCE OF THE 

TOWN CATHEDRAL THE MARINA VICEROY LEOPOLD 

MONASTERY OF THE CAPUCHINS — CELEBRATED CATACOMBS 

FANCIFUL GARDEN. 

June 24, 1833. 

The mountain-coast of Sicily lay piled up before us at the 
distance of ten or twelve miles, when I came on deck this 



110 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

^morning. The quarter-master handed me the glass, and. 
running my eye along the shore, I observed three or 
four low plains, extending between projecting spurs of the 
hills, studded thickly with country-houses, and bright with 
groves which I knew, by the deep glancing green, to be 
the orange. In a corner of the longest of these intervals, 
a sprinkling of white, looking in the distance like a bed of 
pearly shells on the edge of the sea, was pointed out as 
•Palermo. With a steady glass its turrets and gardens be- 
came apparent, and its mole, bristling above the wall with 
masts ; and running in with a free wind, the character of 
our ship was soon recognised from the shore, and the flags 
of every vessel in the harbour ran up to the mast, the cus- 
tomary courtesy to a man-of-war entering port. 

As the ship came to her anchorage, the view of the city 
was very captivating. The bend of the shore embraced our 
position, and the eastern half of the curve was a succession 
of gardens and palaces. A broad street extended along in 
front, crowded with people gazing at the frigates ; and up 
one of the long avenues of the public garden we could dis- 
tinguish the veiled women walking in groups, children 
playing, priests, soldiers, and all the motley frequenters of 
such places in this idle clime, enjoying the refreshing sea- 
breeze upon whose wings we had come. I was impatient 
to get ashore, but, between the health-officer and some 
other hindrances, it was evening before we set foot , upon 
the pier. 

With Captain Nicholson and the purser I walked up the 
Toledo, as the still half- asleep tradesmen were opening their 
shops after the siesta. The oddity of the Palermitan style 
of building struck me forcibly. Of the two long streets, 
crossing each other at right angles and extending to the 
four gates of the city, the lower story of every house is a 
shop, of course. The second and third stories are orna- 
mented with tricksy-looking iron balconies, in which the 
women sit at work universally ; while from above projects, 
far over the street, a grated enclosure, like a long bird- 
cage, from which look down girls and children, (or, if it is 
a convent, the nuns) as if it were an airy prison to keep 
the household from the contact of the world. The whole 
air of Palermo is different from that of the towns upon the 



PALERMO THE CORSO. Ill 

Continent. The peculiarities are said to be Saracenic, and 
inscriptions in Arabic are still found upon the ancient 
buildings. The town is poetically called the concha oVoro y 
or the (i golden shell." 

We walked on to the cathedral, followed by a troop of 
literally naked beggars, baked black in the sun, and more 
emaciated and diseased than any I have yet seen abroad. 
Their cries and gestures were painfully energetic. In the 
course of five minutes we had seen two or three hundred. 
They lay along the sidewalks, and upon the steps of the 
houses and churches, — men, women, and children, nearly 
or quite naked, and as unnoticed by the inhabitants as the 
stones of the street. 

Ten or twenty indolent-looking priests sat in the shade 
t the porch of the cathedral. The columns of the vesti- 
bule were curiously wrought, the capitals exceedingly rich 
with fretted leaf- work, and the ornaments of the front of 
the same wild-looking character as the buildings of the 
town. A hunchback, scarce three feet high, came up and 
offered his services as a cicerone, and we entered the church. 
The antiquity of the interior was injured by the new white 
paint, covering every part except the more valuable decora- 
tions ; but with its four splendid sarcophagi standing like 
separate buildings, in the aisles, and covering the ashes of 
Ruggiero and his kinsmen ; the eighty columns of Egyp- 
tian granite in the nave ; the ciborio of entire lapis-lazuli 
with its lovely blue ; and the mosaics, frescos, and relievos, 
about the altar, it could scarce fail of producing an effect of 
great richness. The floor was occupied by here and there 
a kneeling beggar, praying in his rags, and undisturbed 
even by the tempting neighbourhood of strangers. I stood 
long by an old man, who seemed hardly to have the 
strength to hold himself upon his knees. His eyes were 
fixed upon a lovely picture of the Virgin, and his trembling 
hands loosed bead after bead as his prayer proceeded. I 
slipped a small piece of silver between his palm and the 
cross of his rosary, and, without removing his eyes from the 
face of the Holy Mother, he implored an audible blessing 
upon me in a tone of the most earnest feeling. I have 
scarce been so moved within my recollection. 

The equipages were beginning to roll towards the €c Ma- 



112 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

rina/' and the sea-breeze was felt even through the streets; 
We took a carriage and followed to the Corso, where we 
counted near two hundred gay, well-appointed equipages, 
in the course of an hour. What a contrast to the wretched- 
ness we had left behind ! Driving up and down this 'half- 
mile in front of the palaces on the sea, seemed quite a suf- 
ficient 'amusement for the indolent nobility of Palermo. 
TJiey were named to us by their imposing titles as they 
passed, and we looked in vain into their dull unanimated 
faces for the chivalrous character of the once-renowned 
knights of Sicily. Ladies and gentlemen sat alike silent, 
leaning back in their carriages in the elegant attitudes 
studied to such effect on this side the water, and gazing 
7. r acquaintances among those passing on the opposite line. 
Towards the dusk of the evening, an avant-courier on 
Horseback announced the approach of the viceroy Leopold, 
the brother of the king of Naples. He drove himself in 
an English hunting- waggon with two seats, and looked 
like a dandy whip of the first water from Regent Street. 
He is about twenty, and very handsome. His horses, fine 
English bays, flew up and down the short corso, passing 
and repassing every other minute, till we were weary of 
touching our hats and stopping till he had gone by. He 
noticed the uniform of our officers, and raised his hat with 
particular politeness to them. 

As it grew dark, the carriages came to a stand around a 
small open gallery raised in the broadest part of the 
Marina. Rows of lamps, suspended from the roof, were 
lit, and a band of forty or fifty musicians appeared in the 
area, and played parts of the popular operas. We were told 
they performed every night from nine till twelve. Chairs 
were set around for the people on foot, ices circulated, and 
some ten or twelve thousand people enjoyed the music in 
the delicious moonlight, keeping perfect silence from the 
first note till the last. These heavenly nights of Italy are 
thus begun, and at twelve the people separate and go to 
visit, or lounge at home till morning, when the windows 
are closed, the cool night-air shut in, and they sleep till 
evening comes on again, literally " keeping the hours the 
stars do." It is very certain that it is the only way to 
enjoy life in this enervating climate. The sun is the worst 



CAVUCHIK CATACOMBS. 113 

enemy to health, and life and spirits sink under its inten- 
sity. The English, who are the only people abroad in an 

Italian noon, are constant victims to it. 

****** 

We drove this morning to the monastery of the Capu- 
chins. Three or four of the brothers, in long grey beards, 
and the heavy brown sackcloth cowls of the order tied 
around the waist with ropes, received us cordially and took 
us through the cells and chapels. We had come to see the 
famous catacombs of the convent. A door was opened in 
the side of the main cloister, and we descended a long flight 
of stairs into the centre of three lofty vaults, lighted each 
by a window at the extremity of the ceiling. A more frightful 
scene never appalled the eye. The walls were lined with shal- 
low niches, from which hung, leaning forward, as if to fall 
upon the gazer, the dried bodies of monks in the full dress 
of their order. Their hands were crossed upon their 
breasts or hung at their sides, their faces were blackened 
and withered, and every one seemed to have preserved, in 
diabolical caricature, the very expression of life. The hair 
lay reddened and dry on the dusty skull; the teeth, per- 
fect or imperfect, had grown brown in their open mouths ; 
the nose had shrunk ; the cheeks fallen in and cracked ; 
and they loooked more like living men cursed with some 
horrid plague than the inanimate corpses they were. The 
name of each was pinned upon his cowl, with his age and 
the time of his death. Below, in three or four tiers, lay 
long boxes painted fantastically, and containing, the monk 
told us, the remains of Sicilian nobles. Upon a long shelf 
above sat, perhaps, a hundred children of from one year to 
five, in little chairs worn with their use w T hile in life, 
dressed in the gayest manner, with fanciful caps upon their 
little blackened heads, dolls in their hands, and, in one or 
two instances, a stuffed dog or parrot lying in their laps. 
A more horribly ludicrous collection of little withered 
faces, shrunk into expression so entirely inconsistent with 
the gaiety of their dresses, could scarce be conceived. One 
of them had his arm tied up, holding a child's whip in the 
act of striking, while the poor thing's head had rotted and 
dropped upon his breast ; and a leather cap fallen on one 
side showed his bare skull, with the most comical expression 

i 



114 PENCILLINGS BY fHE WAY. 

of carelessness. We quite shocked the old monk with our 
laughter, but the scene was irresistible. 

We went through several long galleries rilled in the same 
manner with the dead monks standing over the coffins of 
nobles, and children on the shelf above. There were three 
thousand bodies and upwards in the place, monks and all. 
Some of them were very ancient. There was one, dated a 
century and a half back, whose tongue still hangs from his 
mouth. The friar took hold of it, and moved it up and 
down, rattling it against his teeth. It was like a piece of 
dried fish- skin, and as sharp and thin as a nail. 

At the extremity of the last passage was a new vault 
appropriated to women. There were nine already lying on 
white pillows in the different recesses, who had died within 
the year, and among them a young girl, the daughter of a 
noble family of Palermo, stated in the inscription to have 
been a virgin of seventeen years. The monk said her twin- 
sister was one of the most beautiful women of the city at 
this moment. She was laid upon her back, on a small 
shelf, faced with a wire grating, dressed in white, with a 
large bouquet of artificial flowers on the centre of the body 
Her hands and face were exposed, and the skin, which 
seemed to me scarcely dry, was covered with small black 
ants. I struck with my stick against the shelf, and, 
startled by the concussion, the disgusting vermin poured 
from the mouth and nostrils in hundreds. How difficult it 
is to believe that the beauty we worship must come to this ! 

As we went towards the staircase, the friar showed us 
the deeper niches, in which the bodies were placed for the 
first six months. There were fortunately no fresh bodies 
in them at the time of our visit. The stench, for a week 
or two, he told us, was intolerable. They are suffered to 
get quite dry here, and then are disposed of according to 
their sex or profession. A rope passed round the middle 
fastens the dead monk to his shallow niche, and there he 
stands till his bones rot from each other, sometimes for a 
century or more. 

We hurried up the gloomy stairs, and, giving the monk 
our gratuity, were passing out of the cloister to our car- 
riage, when two of the brothers entered, bearing a sedan- 
cnair with the blinds closed. Our friend called us back 



SICILIAN GARDEN. US 

and opened the door. An old grey-headed woman sat bolt up- 
right within, with a rope around her body and another round 
her neck, supporting her by two rings in the back of the se- 
dan. She had died that morning, and was brought to be dried 
in the capuchin catacombs. The effect of the newly-deceased 
body in a handsome silk dress and plaited cap was horrible. 
We drove from the monastery to the gardens of a Sicilian 
prince, near by. I was agreeably disappointed to find the 
grounds laid out in the English taste, winding into se- 
cluded walks shaded with undipped trees, and opening into 
glades of greensward cooled by fountains. We strolled on 
from one sweet spot to another, coming constantly upon 
little Grecian temples, ruins, broken aqueducts, aviaries, 
bowers furnished with curious seats and tables, bridges 
over streams, and labyrinths of shrubbery ending in hermit- 
ages built curiously of cane. So far, the garden, though 
lovely, was like many others. On our return, the person 
who accompanied us began to surprise us with singular 
contrivances — fortunately for us, selecting the coachman 
who had driven us as the subject of his experiments. In 
the middle of a long green alley he requested him to step 
forward a few paces, and, in an instant, streams of water 
poured upon him from the bushes around in every direc- 
tion. There were seats in the arbours, the least pressure 
of which sent up a stream beneath the unwary visitor ; 
steps to an ascent, which 3 r ou no sooner touched than you 
were showered from an invisible source ; and one small 
hermitage, which sent a jet-d'eau into the face of a person 
lifting the latch. Nearly in the centre of the garden stood 
a pretty building, with an ascending staircase. At the first 
step, a friar in white, represented to the life in wax, opened 
the door, and fixed his eyes on the comer. At the next 
step, the door was violently shut. At the third, it was 
half-opened again, and as the foot pressed the platform 
above, both doors flew wide open, and the old friar made 
room for the visitor to enter. Life itself could not have 
been more natural. The garden was full of similar tricks. 
We were hurried away by an engagement before we had 
seen them all ; and stopping for a moment to look at a 
magnificent Egyptian Ibis, walking around in an aviary 
like a temple, we drove into town to dinner 

i 2 



11 3 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 



LETTER XXII. 

tTHE LUNATIC ASYLUM AT PALERMO — MARINA DISTRESS OF TH£ 

SICILIANS — CONSPIRACIES. 

June 27, 1823. 

Two of the best-conducted lunatic asylums in the world are 
in the kingdom of Naples — one at A versa, near Capua, and 
the other at Palermo. The latter is managed by a whim- 
sical Sicilian baron, who has devoted his time and fortune 
to it, and, with the assistance of the government, has carried 
it to great extent and perfection. The poor are received 
gratuitously ; and those who can afford it, enter as boarders, 
and are furnished with luxuries according to their means. 

The hospital stands in an airy situation in the lovely 
neighbourhood of Palermo. We were received by a porter 
in a respectable livery, who introduced us immediately to 
the old baron — a kind-looking man, rather advanced beyond 
middle life, of manners singularly well-bred and preposses- 
sing. t€ Je suis le premier fou," said he, throwing his arms 
out as he bowed on our entrance. We stood in an open 
court, surrounded with porticos lined with stone seats. On 
one of them lay a fat, indolent-looking man, in clean gray 
clothes, talking to himself with great apparent satisfaction. 
He smiled at the baron as he passed, without checking the 
motion of his lips ; and three others standing in the door- 
way of a room marked as the kitchen, smiled also as he 
came up, and fell into his train, apparently as much inter- 
ested as ourselves in the old man's explanation. 

The kitchen was occupied by eight or ten people all at 
work, and all, the baron assured us, mad. One man, of 
about forty, was broiling a steak with the gravest atten- 
tion. Another who had been furious till employment was 
given him, was chopping meat with violent industry in a 
large wooden bowl. Two or three girls were about, obey- 
ing the little orders of a middle-aged man, occupied with 
several messes cooking on a patent stove. I was rather 
incredulous about his insanity, till he took a small bucket 
and went to the jet of a fountain, and, getting impatient 
from some cause or other, dashed the water upon the floor, 



LUNATIC ASYLUM. 117 

The baron mildly called him by name, and mentioned to 
him as a piece of information that he had wet the floor. 
He nodded his head, and, filling his bucket quietly, poured 
a little into one of the pans, and resumed his occupation. 

We passed from the kitchen into an open court, curiously 
paved and ornamented with Chinese grottos, artificial rocks, 
trees, cottages, and fountains. Within the grottos reclined 
figures of wax. Before the altar of one. fitted up as a 
Chinese chapel, a mandarin was prostrated in prayer. The 
walls on every side were painted in perspective scenery, and 
the whole had as little the air of a prison as the open val- 
ley itself. In one of the corners was an unfinished grotto, 
and a handsome young man was entirely absorbed in thatch- 
ing the ceiling with strips of cane. The baron pointed to 
him, and said he had been incurable till he found this em- 
ployment for him. Every thing about us, too, he assured 
us, was the work of his patients. They had paved the 
court, built the grottos and cottages, and painted the walls 
under his direction. The secret of his whole system, he 
said, was employment and constant kindness. He had 
usually about one hundred and fifty patients, and he dis- 
missed upon an average two- thirds of them quite recovered. 

We went into the apartment of the women. These, he 
said, were his worst subjects. In the first room sat eight 
or ten employed in spinning, while one infuriated creature, 
not more than thirty, but quite gray, was walking up and 
down the floor, talking and gesticulating with the greatest 
violence. A young girl of sixteen, an attendant, had 
entered into her humour, and, with her arm put affection- 
ately round her waist, assented to every thing she said, and 
called her by every name of endearment while endeavour- 
ing to silence her. When the baron entered, the poor 
creature addressed herself to him, and seemed delighted 
that he had come. He made several mild attempts to check 
her, but she seized his hands, and with the veins of her 
throat swelling with passion, her eyes glaring terribly, and 
her tongue white and trembling, she continued to declaim 
more and more violently. The baron gave an order to a 
male attendant at the door, and, beckoning us to follow, 
led her gently through a small court planted with trees, to 
a room containing a hammock. She checked her torrent of 



118 PENCILLIXGS BY THE WAY. 

language as she observed the preparations going on, and 
seemed amused with the idea of swinging. The man took 
her up in his arms without resistance, and laced the ham- 
mock oyer her, confining every thing but her head; and 
the female attendant, one of the most playful and prepos- 
sessing little creatures I ever saw, stood on a chair, and at 
every swing threw a little water on her face as if in sport. 
Once or twice the maniac attempted to resume the subject 
of her ravings, but the girl laughed in her face and diverted 
her from it, till at last she smiled, and. dropping her head 
into the hammock, seemed disposed to sink into an easy 
sleep. 

We left her swinging, ana went out into the court, 
where eight or ten women in the gray gowns of the estab- 
lishment were walking up and down, or sitting under the 
trees, lost in thought. One, with a fine intelligent face, 
came up to me and curtsied gracefully without speaking. 
The physician of the establishment joined me at the 
moment, and asked her what she wished. " To kiss his 
hand," said she, " but his looks forbade me." She coloured 
deeply, and folded her arms across her breast, and walked 
away. The baron called us, and in going out I passed her 
again, and, taking her hand, kissed it, and bade her good- 
bye. " You had better kiss my lips," said she; "you'll 
never see me again." She laid her forehead against the 
iron bars of the gate, and with a face working with emo- 
tion, watched us till we turned out of sight. I asked the 
physician for her history. " It was a common case/' he 
said. " She was the daughter of a Sicilian noble, who,, 
too poor to marry her to one of her own rank, had sent her 
to a convent, where confinement had driven her mad. She 
is now a charity patient in the asylum." 

The courts in which these poor creatures are confined 
open upon a large and lovely garden. We walked through 
it with the baron, and then returned to the apartments of 
the females. In passing a cell, a large majestic woman 
strided out with a theatrical air, and commenced an address 
to the Deity, in a language strangely mingled of Italian 
and Greek. Her eyes were naturally large and soft, but 
excitement had given them additional dilation and fire, and 
she looked a prophetess. Her action, with all its energy, 



GREEK PATIENT. 119 

was lady-like. Her feet, half- covered with slippers, were 
well-formed and slight, and she had every mark of supe- 
riority both of birth and endowment. The baron took her 
by the hand with the deferential courtesy of the old school, 
and led her to one of the stone seats. She yielded to him 
politely, but resumed her harangue, upbraiding the Deity, 
as well as I could understand her, for her misfortunes. 
They succeeded in soothing her by the assistance of the 
same playful attendant who had accompanied the other to 
the hammock, and she sat still, with her lips white and her 
tongue trembling like an aspen. While the good old baron 
was endeavouring to draw her into a quiet conversation, 
the physician told me some curious circumstances respecting 
her. She was a Greek, and had been brought to Palermo 
when a girl. Her mind had been destroyed by an illness, 
and after seven years' madness, during which she had re- 
fused to rise from her bed, and had quite lost the use of her 
limbs, she was brought to this establishment bv her friends. 
Experiments were tried in vain to induce her to move from 
her painful position. At last the baron determined upon 
addressing what he considered the master-passion in all 
female bosoms. He dressed himself in the gayest manner, 
and, in one of her gentle moments, entered her room with 
respectful ceremony and offered himself to her in marriage ! 
She refused him with scorn, and with seeming emotion he 
begged forgiveness and left her. The next morning, on his 
entrance, she smiled — the first time for years. He conti- 
nued his attentions for a day or two, and after a little 
coquetry she one morning announced to him that she had 
re- considered his proposal, and would be his bride. They 
raised her from her bed to prepare her for the ceremony, 
and she was carried in a chair to the garden, where the 
bridal feast was spread, nearly all the other patients of the 
hospital being present. The gaiety of the scene absorbed 
the attention of all ; the utmost decorum prevailed ; and 
when the ceremony was performed, the bride was crowned, 
and carried back in state to her apartment. She re- 
covered gradually the use of her limbs ; her health is im- 
proved, and excepting an occasional paroxysm, such as we 
happened to witness, she is quiet and contented. The 
other inmates of the asylum still call her the bride ; and 



120 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

the baron, as her husband, has the greatest influence 
over her. 

While the physician was telling me these circumstances, 
the baron had succeeded in calming her, and she sat with 
her arms folded, dignified and silent. He was still holding 
her hand, when the woman whom we had left swinging in 
the hammock, came stealing up behind the trees on tiptoe, 
and, putting her hand suddenly over the baron's eyes, 
kissed him on both sides of his face, laughing heartily, and 
calling him by every name of affection. The contrast 
between this mood and the infuriated one in which we had 
found her, was the best comment on the good man's system. 
He gently disengaged himself, and apologised to his lady 
for allowing the liberty, and we followed him to another 
apartment. 

It opened upon a pretty court, in which a fountain was 
playing, and against the different columns of the portico sat 
some half-dozen patients. A young man of eighteen, with 
a very pale, scholar-like face, was reading Ariosto. Near 
him, under the direction of an attendant, a fair, delicate 
girl, with a sadness in her soft blue eyes that might have 
been a study for a mater dolorosa, was cutting paste upon 
a board laid across her lap. She seemed scarcely conscious 
of what she was about ; and when I approached and spoke 
to her, she laid down the knife and rested her head upon 
her hand, and looked at me steadily, as if she was trying to 
recollect where she had known me. " I cannot remember/' 
she said to herself, and went on with her occupation. I 
bowed to her as we took our leave, and she returned it 
gracefully, but coldly. The young man looked up from 
his book and smiled ; the old man lying on the stone seat 
in the outer court rose up and followed us to the door, and 
we were bowed out by the baron and his gentle madmen 
as politely and kindly as if we were concluding a visit to a 

company of friends. 

***** 

An evening out of doors, in summer, is pleasant enough 
anywhere in Italy : but I have found no place where the 
people and their amusements were so concentrated at that 
hour, as upon the €t Marina " of Palermo. A ramble with 
the officers up and down ; renewing the acquaintances made 



THE MARINA. 121 

with risitors to the ships ; listening to the music and ob- 
serving the various characters of the crowd, conclude every- 
day agreeably. A terraced promenade, twenty feet above 
the street, extends nearly the whole length of the Marina, 
and here under the balconies of the viceroy's palace, with 
the crescent harbour spread out before the eye, trees above, 
and marble seats tempting the weary at every step, may be 
met pedestrians of every class, from the first cool hour when 
the sea-breeze sets in till midnight or morning. The in- 
tervals between the pieces performed by the royal band in £x* 
the centre of the drive is seized by the wandering im- 
provisatrice or the ludicrous puncinello, and even the beggars 
cease to importune in the general abandonment to pleasure. 
Every other moment the air is filled with a delightful 
perfume, and you are addressed by the bearer of a tall pole 
tied thickly with the odorous flowers of this voluptuous 
climate — a mode of selling these cheap luxuries which I 
believe is peculiar to Palermo. The gaiety they give a 
crowd, by the way, is singular. They move about among 
the gaudily-dressed contadini like a troop of banners — tulips, 
narcissus, moss-roses, branches of jasmine, geraniums, every 
flower that is rare and beautiful scenting the air from a 
hundred overladed poles, and the merest pittance will pur- 
chase the rarest and loveliest. It seems a clime of fruits 
and flowers; and if one could but shut his eyes to the 
dreadful contrasts of nakedness and starvation, he might 
believe himself in a Utopia. 

We were standing on the balcony of the consul's residence, 
(a charming situation overlooking the Marina,) and re- 
marking the gaiety of the scene on the first evening of our 
arrival. The conversation turned upon the condition of 
the people. The consul remarked that it was an every-day 
circumstance to find beggars starved to death in the streets, 
and that, in the small villages near Palermo, eight or ten 
were often taken up dead from the road-side in the morning. 
The difficulty of getting a subsistence is every day in- 
creasing, and in the midst of one of the most fertile spots of 
the earth, one half the population are driven to the last 
extremity for bread. The results appear in constant con- 
spiracies against the government, detected and put down 
with more or less difficulty. The island is garrisoned with 



122 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

troops from Italy, and the viceroy has lately sent to his 
brother for a re-inforcement, and is said to feel very 
insecure. 






LETTER XXIII. 



PETE GIVEN BY MR. GARDINER, THE AMERICAN CONSUL- 
MESSINA LIPARI ISLANDS — SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS. 

June, 1835. 

The curve of " The Golden Shell/' which bends to the 
east of Palermo, is a luxuriant plain of ten miles in length, 
terminated by a bluff which forms a headland corner of the 
bay. A broad neck of land between this bay and another 
indenting the coast less deeply on the other side, is occupied 
by a cluster of summer palaces belonging to several of the 
richer princes of Sicily. The breeze, whenever there is one 
on land or sea, sweeps freshly across this ridge ; and a more 
desirable residence for combined coolness and beauty could 
scarce be imagined. The Palermitan princes, however, 
find every country more attractive than their own ; and 
while you may find a dozen of them in any city of Europe, 
their once magnificent residences are deserted and falling to 
decay, almost without an exception. 

The old walls of one of these palaces were enlivened 
yesterday by &fete given to the officers of the squadron by 
the American consul, Mr. Gardiner. We left Palermo in 
a long cavalcade, followed by a large omnibus containing 
the ship's band, early in the forenoon. The road was 
lined with prickly pear and oleander in the most luxuriant 
blossom. Exotics in our country, these plants are indige- 
nous to Sicily, and form the only hedges to the large 
plantations of cane and the spreading vineyards and fields. 
A more brilliant show than these long lines of trees, laden 
with bright pink flowers, and varied by the gigantic and 
massive leaf of the pear, cannot easily be imagined. 

We were to visit one or two palaces on our way. The 
carriage drew up about eight miles from town, at the gate 
of a ruinous building, and, passing through a deserted 



FETE AT PALERMO. 125 

court, we entered an old-fashioned garden, presenting one 
succession of trimmed walks, urns, statues, and fountains* 
The green mould of age and exposure upon the marbles, 
the broken seats, the once costly but now ruined and silent 
fountains, the tall weeds in the seldom- trodden walks, and 
the wild vegetation of fragrant jasmine and briar, burying; 
everything with its luxuriance, all told the story of decay* 
I remembered the scenes of the Decameron — the " hundred 
tales of love," — laid in these very gardens ; the gay romances* 
of which Palermo was the favourite home, and the dames 
and knights of Sicily, the fairest and bravest themes ; and I 
longed to let my merry companions pass on, and remain to 
realise more deeply the spells of poetry and story. The 
pleasure of travel is in the fancy. Men and manners are 
so nearly alike over the world, and the same annoyances 
disturb so certainly,' wherever we are, the gratification of 
seeing and conversing with our living fellow -beings, that it 
is only by the mingled illusion of fancy and memory, by 
getting apart, and peopling the deserted palace or the 
sombre ruin from the pages of a book, that we ever realise 
the anticipated pleasure of standing on celebrated ground. 
The eye, the curiosity, are both disappointed, and the voice 
of a common companion reduces the most romantic ruin to? 
a heap of stone. In some of the footsteps of Childe Harold 
himself, with his glorious thoughts upon my lips and all 
that moved his imagination addressing my eye with the ad- 
ditional grace which his poetry has left around them, I have 
found myself unably to overstep the vulgar circumstances of 
the hour. The " Temple of the Clitumnus " was a ruined 
shed glaring in the sunshine, and the " Cottage of Petrarch** 
an apology for extortion and annoyance. 

I heard a shout from the party, and followed them to a 
building at the foot of the garden. I passed the threshold 
and started back. A ghastly monk, with a broom in his 
hand, stood gazing at me, and at a door just beyond, a 
decrepid nun was see-sawing backwards and forwards, 
ringing a bell with the most impatient violence. I ventured 
to pass in ; and a door opened at the right, disclosing the 
self- denying cell of a hermit with his narrow bed and single 
chair, and at the table sat the rosy-gilled friar, filling his 
glass from an antiquated bottle, and nodding his head to his 



( 



124 PEXCILLING3 23 Y THE WAY. 

visitor in grinning welcome. A long cloister with six or 
-eight cells extended beyond, and in each was a monk in 
some startling attitude, or a pale and saintly nun employed 
in work or prayer. The whole was as like a living mo- 
nastery as wax could make it. The mingling of monks 
and nuns seemed an anachronism, but we were told that it 
represented a tale, the title of which I have forgotten. It 
w#s certainly an odd as well as an expensive fancy for a 
garden ornament, and shows by its uselessness the once 
princely condition of the possessors of the palace. An 
Englishman married not many years since an old princess, 
to whom the estates had descended; and with much un- 
available property and the title of prince, he has entered 
the service of the king of the Sicilies for a support. 

We drove on to another palace, still more curious in its 
ornaments. The extensive walls which enclosed it ; the 
gates, the fountains in the courts and gardens, were studded 
with marble monsters of every conceivable deformity. The 
head of a man crowned the body of an eagle, standing on 
the legs of a horse ; the lovely face and bosom of a female 
crouched upon the body of a dog ; alligators, serpents, lions, 
monkeys, birds, and reptiles were mixed up with parts of 
the human body in the most revolting variety. So ad- 
mirable was the work, too, and so beautiful the material, 
that even outraged taste would hesitate to destroy them. 
The wonder is, that artists of so much merit could have 
been hired to commit such sins against decency, or that a 
man in his senses would waste upon them the fortune they 
must have cost. 

We mounted a massive flight of steps, with a balustrade 
of gorgeously carved marble, and entered a hall hung round 
with the family portraits, the eccentric founder at their 
head. He was a thin, quizzical-looking gentleman, in a 
laced coat and sword, and had precisely the face I imagined 
for him — that of a whimsied madman. You would select 
it from a thousand as the subject for a lunatic asylum. 

We were led next to a long narrow hall, famous for 

having dined the king and his courtiers an age or two ago. 

The ceiling was of plate mirror, reflecting us all, upside 

••down, as we strolled through, and the walls were 

studded from the floor to the roof with the quartz diamond, 



FETE AT PALERMO. 125 

(valueless, but brilliant,) bits of coloured glass, spangles, 
and everything that could reflect light. The effect, when 
the quaint old chandeliers were lit, and the table spread. 
with silver and surrounded by a king and his nobles* in the 
costume of a court in the olden time, must have exceeded 
%ery. 

Beyond, we were ushered into the state drawing-room; 
d saloon of grand proportions, roofed like the other with 
mirrors, but paved and lined throughout with the costliest, 
marbles ; Sicilian agates ; paintings set in the wall and 
covered w 7 ith glass, w r hile on pedestals around stood statues 
of the finest workmanship, representing the males of the 
family in the costume or armour of the times,. A table of 
inlaid precious stones stood in the centre ; cabinets of lapis- 
lazuli and side-tables occupied the spaces between the fur- 
niture, and the chairs and sofas were covered with the rich 
velvet stuffs now out of use, embroidered and fringed 
magnificently. I sat down upon a tripod stool, and with 
my eyes half closed looked up at the mirrored reflections of 
the officers in the ceiling, and tried to imagine back the 
gay throngs that had moved across the floor they were 
treading so unceremoniously ; the knightly and royal feet 
that had probably danced the stars down with the best 
beauty of Sicily beneath those silent mirrors; the joy, the 
jealousy, the love and hate that had lived their hour and 
been repeated, as were our lighter feelings and faces now, 
outlived by the perishing mirrors that might still outlive 
ours as long. How much there is an atmosphere ! How 
full the air of these old palaces is of thought ! How one 
might enjoy them, could he ramble here alone, or with one 
congenial and amusing companion, to answer to hit 



i ualizmg. 



We drove on to our appointment. At the end of a hand« 
«ome avenue stood a large palace, in rather more modern. 
taste than those we had left. The crowd of carriages in 
the court, the gold-laced midshipmen scattered about the 
massive stairs and in the formal walks of the gardens, the 
gay dresses of the ship's band playing on the terrace, and 
the troops of ladies and gentlemen in every direction, gave 
an air of bustle to the stately structure that might have 
reminded the marble nymphs of the days when they were 



126 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY 

first lifted to their pedestals. The old hall was thrown 
open at two, and a table stretching from one end to the 
other, loaded with every luxury of the season, and capable 
of accommodating sixty or seventy persons, usurped the 
place of unsubstantial romance, and brought in the wildest 
straggler willingly f / om his ramble. No cost had been spared 
^and the hospitable consul (a Bostonian) did the honours of 
tiis table in a manner that stirred powerfully my pride of 
country and birthplace. All the English resident in 
Palermo were present ; and it was the more agreeable to 
me that their countrymen are usually the only givers of 
generous entertainment in Europe. One feels ever so 
•distant a reflection on his country abroad. The liberal and 
elegant hospitality of one of our countrymen at Florence* 
lias served me as a better argument against the charge of 
iiardness and selfishness urged upon our nation, than all 
which could be drawn from the acknowledgements of 
travellers. 

When dinner was over, an hour was passed at coffee in a 
small saloon stained after the fashion of Pompeii, and we 
then assembled on a broad terrace facing the sea, and, with 
the band in the gallery above, commenced dances which 
lasted till an hour or two into the moonlight. The sunset 
had the eternal but untiring glory of the Italian summer, 
£tnd it never sat on a gayer party. There were among the 
English one or two lovely girls ; and with the four ladies 
belonging to the squadron, (the Commodore's family and 
Captain Reed's) the dancers were sufficient to include all 
the officers, and the scene in the soft light of the moon was 
like a description in an old tale. The broad sea on either 
side, broke by the headland in front ; the distant crescent 
of lights glancing along the sea-side at Palermo ; the solemn 
old palaces seen from the eminence around us, and the noble 
pile through whose low windows we strolled out upon the 
terrace ; the music and the excitement ; all blended a scene 
that is drawn with bright and living lines in my memory. 
We parted unwillingly, and, reaching Palermo about mid- 
night, pulled off to the frigates, and were under weigh at 

^daylight for Messina. 

****** 

* Colonel Thorn. 



SUMMER SAILING. 127 

This is the poetry of sailing. The long, low frigate 
glides on through the water with no more motion than is 
felt in a dining-room on shore. The sea changes only from 
a glossy calm to a feathery ripple; the sky is always serene; 
the merchant sail appears and disappears on the horizon 
edge ; the island rises on the bow, creeps along the quarter, 
is examined by the glasses of the idlers on deck, and sinks* 
gradually astern ; the sun-fish whirls in the eddy of the 
wake ; the tortoise plunges and breathes about us ; and the 
delightful temperature of the sea, even and invigorating, 
keeps both mind and body in an undisturbed equilibrium of 
•enjoyment. For me it is a paradise. I am glad to escape 
from the contact, the dust, the trials of temper, the noon- 
day sultriness and the midnight chill ; the fatigue, and 
privation, and vexation, which beset the traveller on shore. 
I shall return to it no doubt willingly after a while, but, 
for the present, it is rest, it is relief, refreshment, to be at 
sea. There is no swell in the Mediterranean during the 
summer months, and this gliding about, sleeping or reading 
as if at home, from one port to another, seems to me just 
now the Utopia of enjoyment. 

We have been all day among the Lipari Islands. It is 
pleasant to look up at the shaded and peaceful huts on their 
mountain sides, as we creep along under them, or to watch 
the fisherman's children with a glass, as they run out from 
their huts on the sea-shore to gaze at the uncommon appa- 
rition of a ship-of-war. They seem seats of solitude and 
retirement. I have just dropped the glass, which I had 
raised to look at what I took to be a large ship in full sail 
rounding the point of Felicudi. It is a tall, pyramidal rock, 
rising right from the sea, and resembling exactly a ship 
with studding-sails set, coming down before the wind. The 
band is playing on the deck, and a fisherman's boat with 
twenty of the islanders resting on their oars, and listening 
in wondering admiration, lies just under our quarter. It 
will form a tale for the evening meal, to which they were 
hastening home. 

***** * 

We ran between Scylla and Charybdis, with a fresh 
wind and a strong current. The " dogs" were silent, and 
the " whirlpool" is a bubble to Hurl-gate. Scylla is quite 



^28 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

a town, and the tall rock at the entrance of the strait is 
crowned with a large building, which seems part of a fortifi- 
cation. The passage through the Faro is lovely — quite like 
a river. Messina lies in a curve of the western shore, at the 
base of a hill ; and, opposite, a graceful slope covered 'with 
vineyards swells up to a broad table plain on the mountain, 
which looked like the home of peace and fertility. 

.We rounded- to off the town, to send in for letters, and I 
went ashore in the boat. Two American friends, whora I 
had as little expectation of meeting as if I had dropped upon 
Jerusalem, hailed me from the grating of the health-office, 
before we reached the land, and, having exhibited our bill 
of health, I had half an hour for a call upon an old friend 
resident at Messina, and we were off again to the ship. 
The sails filled, and we shot away on a strong breeze down 
the Straits. Rhegium lay on our left — a large cluster of 
old-looking houses on the edge of the sea. It was at this 
town of Calabria that St. Paul landed on his journey to 
Rome. We sped on without much time to look at it, even 
with a glass, and were soon rounding the toe of "the boot" 
— the southern point of Italy. We are heading at this 
moment for the Gulf of Tarento, and hope to be in Venice 
by the fourth of July. 



LETTER XXIV. 

THE ADRIATIC ALBANIA GAY COSTUMES AND BEAUTY OF THE 

ALBANESE — CAPO d'iSTRIA VISIT TO THE AUSTRIAN AUTHORITIES 

OF THE PROVINCE — CURIOSITY OF THE INHABITANTS — GENTLE- 
MANLY RECEPTION BY THE MILITARY COMMANDANT — VISIT TO 

VIENNA SINGULAR NOTIONS OF THE AUSTRIANS RESPECTING 

THE AMERICANS — SIMILARITY OF THE SCENERY TO THAT OF 
NEW-ENGLAND MEETING WITH GERMAN STUDENTS FRE- 
QUENT SIGHTS OF SOLDIERS AND MILITARY PREPARATIONS 

PICTURESQUE SCENERY OF STYRIA. 

July 4, 1835. 

The doge of Venice had a fair bride in the Adriatic. It is 
the fourth of July, and with the Italian Cape Colonna on 
©ur left, and the long low coast of Albania shading the 



TRIESTE. 129 

horizon on the east, we are gazing upon her from the deck 
of the first American frigate that has floated upon her 
bosom. We head for Venice, and there is a stir of antici- 
pation on board, felt even through the hilarity of our 
cherished anniversary. I am the only one in the ward- 
room to whom that wonderful city is familiar, and I feel as 
if I had forestalled my own happiness — the first impression 

of it is so enviable. 

* * * * * * 

It is difficult to conceive the gay costumes and handsome 
features of the Albanese, existing in these barren mountains 
that bind the Adriatic. It has been but a continued undu- 
lation of rock and sand for three days past ; and the closer 
we hug to the shore, the more we look at the broad canvass 
above us, and pray for wind. We make Capo d'Istria now ; 
a small town nestled in a curve of the sea, and an hour or 
two more will bring us to Trieste, where we drop anchor, 
we hope, for many an hour of novelty and pleasure. 

Trieste lies sixty or eighty miles from Venice, across the 

head of the gulf. The shore between is piled up to the sky 

with the "blue Friuli mountains; and from the town of 

Trieste, the low coast of Istria breaks away at a right angle 

to the south, forming the eastern bound of the Adriatic. As 

we ran into the harbour on our last tack, we passed close 

under the garden-walls of the villa of the ex-queen of Naples, 

a lovely spot just in the suburbs. The palace of Jerome 

Bonaparte was also pointed out to us by the pilot, on the 

hill just above. They have both removed since to Florence 

and their palaces are occupied by English. We dropped 

anchor within a half mile of the pier, and the flags of a 

dozen American vessels were soon distinguishable among the 

various colours of the shipping in the port. 

****** 

July 9, 1835. 

I accompanied Commodore Patterson to-day on a visit of 

ceremony to the Austrian authorities of the province. We 

made our way with difficulty through the people, crowding 

in hundreds to the water-side, and following us with the 

rude freedom of a showman's audience. The vice-governor 

a polite but Frenchified German Count, received us with 

every profession of kindness. His Parisian gestures sat ill 



130 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

enough upon his national high cheek-bones, lank hair, and 
heavy shoulders. We left him to call upon the military 
commandant — an Irishman, who occupies part of the palace 
of the ex-king of Westphalia. Our reception by him was 
gentlemanly, cordial, and dignified. I think the Irish are, 
after all, the best-mannered people in the world. They are 
found in every country as adventurers for honour, and they 
change neither in character nor manner. They follow 
foreign fashions, and acquire a foreign language ; but in 
the first they retain their heart, and in the latter their 

brogue. They are Irishmen always. Count N is high 

in the favour of the Emperor, has the commission of a field- 
marshal, and is married to a Neapolitan princess, who is a 
most accomplished and lovely woman, and related to most 
of the royal houses of Europe. The Count's reputation as 
a soldier is well known, and he seems to me to have no 
drawback to the enviableness of his life, except his expa- 
triation. 

Trieste is a busy, populous place, resembling extremely 
our new towns in America. We took a stroll through the 
principal streets after our visits were over, and I was sur- 
prised at the splendour of the shops, and the elegance of the 
costumes and equipages. It is said to contain thirty thou- 
sand inhabitants. 

The frigates were to lie three or four weeks at Trieste. 
One half of the officers had taken the steamboat for Venice 
on the second evening of our arrival, and the other half 
waited impatiently their turn of absence. Vienna was but 
some four hundred miles distant, and I might never be so 
near it again. On a rainy evening, at nine o'clock, I left 
Trieste in the " eil-wagon" with a German courier, and 
commenced the ascent of the spur of the Friuli mountains 
that overhangs the bay. 

My companions inside were a merchant from Gratz ; a 
fantastical and poor Hungarian Count; a Corfu shop-keeper, 
and an Italian ex-militaire and present apothecary, going to 
Vienna to marry a lady whom he had never seen. After a 
little bandying of compliments in German, of which I 
understood nothing except that they were apologies for the 
icessant smoking of three disgusting pipes, the conversation. 



A GERMAN INBT. ISt 

fortunately for me, settled into Italian. The mountain was 
steep and very high, and my friends soon grew conversible. 
The novelty of two American frigates in the harbour natu- 
rally decided the first topic. Our Gratz merchant was 
surprised at the light colour of the officers he had seen, and 
doubted if they were not Englishmen in the American 
service. He had always heard Americans were black. 
4i They are so/' said the soldier apothecary ; " I saw the 
real Americans yesterday in a boat, quite black." (One of 
the cutters of the " Constellation" had a negro crew, which 
he had probably seen at the pier.) The assertion seemed to 
satisfy the doubts of all parties. They had wondered how 
such beautiful ships could come from a savage country. It 
was now explained — "They were bought from the English, 
and officered by Englishmen." I was too much amused 
with their speculations to undeceive them ; and with my head 
thrust half out of the window to avoid choking with the 
smoke of their pipes, I gazed back at the glittering lights of 
the town below, and indulged the never palling sensation of 
a first entrance into a new country. The lantern at the peak 
of the st United States" was the last thing I saw as we 
rose the brow of the mountain, and started off on a rapid 
trot towards Vienna. 

I awoke at daylight with the sudden stop of the carriage. 
We were at the low door of a German tavern, and a clear, 
rosy, good-humoured looking girl bade us good morning, as 
we alighted one by one. The phrase was so like English, 
that I asked for a basin of water in my mother tongue. The 
similarity served me again. She brought it without hesita- 
tion ; but the question she asked me as she set it down was 
like nothing that had ever before entered my ears. The 
Count smiled at my embarrassment, and explained that she 
wished to know if I wanted soap. 

I was struck with the cleanliness of every thing. The 
tables, chairs, and floors looked worn away with scrubbing. 
Breakfast was brought in immediately — eggs, rolls, and 
coffee ; the latter in a glass bottle like a chemist's retort, 
corked up tightly, and wrapped in a snowy napkin. It was 
an excellent breakfast, served with cleanliness and good- 
humour, and cost about fourteen cents each. Even from 
this single meal, it seemed to me that I had entered a country 

K 2 



1 32 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

of simple manners and kind feelings. The conductor gravely 
iissed the cheek of the girl who had waited on us ; my 
companions lit their pipes afresh ; and the postilion, in 
cocked-hat and feather, blew a stave of a waltz on his horn, 
and fell into a steady trot, which he kept up with phlegmatic- 
perseverance to the end of his post. 

* * •£ * •* * 

As we get away from the sea, the land grows richer, and 
the farm-houses more frequent. We are in the Duchy of 
Carniola, forty or fifty miles from Trieste. How very 
unlike Italy and France, and how very like New-England 
it is ! There are no ruined castles nor old cathedrals. Every 
"village has its small white church with a tapering spire , 
large manufactories cluster on the water-courses ; the small 
rivers are rapid and deep ; the horses large and strong ; the 
barns immense; the crops heavy; the people grave and hard 
at work, and not a pauper by the post together. We are 
very far north, too, and the climate is like New- En gland* 
The wind, though it is midsummer, is bracing, and there is 
no travelling, as in Italy, with one's hat off and breast open, 
dissolving at midnight in the luxury of the soft air. The 
houses, too, are ugly and comfortable ; staring with paint, 
and pierced in all directions with windows. The children 
are white-headed and serious. The hills are half-covered 
with woods, and clusters of elms are left here and there 
through the meadows, as if their owners could afford to let 
them grow for a shade to the mowers. I was perpetually 
exclaiming, " How like America ! " 

We dined at Laybaeh, My companions had found out 
by my passport that I was an American, and their curiosity 
was most amusing. The report of the arrival of the two 
frigates had reached the capital of Illyria ; and with the 
assistance of the information of my friends, I found myself 
an object of universal attention. The crowd around the 
door of the hotel looked into the windows while we were 
eating, and followed me round the house as if I had been 
a savage. One of the passengers told me they connected 
the arrival of the ships with some political object, and 
thought I might be the envoy. The landlord asked me if 
we had potatoes in our country. 

I took a walk through the city after dinner with my. 



GERMAN STUDENTS. I3S 

mincing friend, the Count. The low, two-story wooden 
houses, the sidewalks enclosed with trees, the matter-of- 
fact looking people, the shut windows, and neat white 
churches, remind me again strongly of America. It was 
like the more retired streets of Portland or Portsmouth. 
The Illyrian language spoken here seemed to me the most 
inarticulate succession of sounds I had ever heard. In 
crossing the bridge in the centre of the town, we met a 
party of German students travelling on foot with their 
knapsacks. My friend spoke to them to gratify my curi- 
osity. I wished to know where they were going. They 
all spoke French and Italian, and seemed in high heart — 
bold, cheerful, and intelligent. They were bound for 
Egypt, determined to seek their fortunes in the service of 
the present reforming and liberal Pasha. Their enthusiasm, 
when they were tokl I was an American, quite thrilled me. 
They closed about me and looked into my eyes, as if they 
expected to read the spirit of freedom in them. I was 
taken by the arms at last, and almost forced into a beer- 
shop. The large tankards were filled, each touched mine 
and the others, and " America " was drank with a grave 
earnestness of manner that moved my heart within me. 
They shook me by the hand on parting, and gave me a 
blessing in German, which, as the old Count translated it, 
was the first word I have learnt of their language. We 
had met constantly parties of them on the road. They all 
! dress alike, in long travelling frocks of brown stuff, and 
small green caps with straight vizors ; but, coarsely as they 
are clothed, and humbly as they seem to be faring, their 
faces bear always a mark that can never be mistaken. They 
look like scholars. 

The roads, by the way, are crowded with pedestrians. It 
seems to be the favourite mode of travelling in this country* 
We have scarce met a carriage, and I have seen, I am sure, 
n one day, two hundred passengers on foot. Among them 
s a class of people peculiar to Germany. I was astonished 
occasionally at being asked for charity by stout well-dressed 
r oung men, to all appearance as respectable as any travel- 
ers on the road. Expressing my surprise, my companions 
nformed me that they were apprentices, and that the cus~ 
om or law of the country compelled them, after completing 






134 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

their indentures, to travel into some distant province, and 
depend upon charity and their own exertions for two or 
three years before becoming masters at their trade. It is a 
singular custom, and, I should think, a useful lesson in 
hardship and self-reliance. They held out their hats with 
a confident independence of look that quite satisfied me 
they felt no degradation in it. 

We soon entered the province of Styria ; and brighter 
rivers, greener woods, richer and more graceful uplands 
and meadows, do not exist in the world. I had thought 
the scenery of Stockbridge, in my own state, unequalled 
till now. I could believe myself there, were not the women 
alone working in the fields, and the roads lined for miles 
together with military waggons and cavalry upon march. 
The conscript law of Austria compels every peasant to serve 
fourteen years ! and the labours of agriculture fall, of 
course, almost exclusively upon females. Soldiers swarm 
like locusts through the country, but they seem as inoffen- 
sive and as much at home as the cattle in the farm-yards. 
It is a curious contrast, to my eye, to see parks of artillery 
glistening in the midst of a wheat-field, and soldiers sitting 
about under the low thatches of these peaceful -looking cot- 
tages. I do not think, among the thousands that I have 
passed in three days' travel, I have seen a gesture or heard 
a syllable. If sitting, they smoke and sit still, and, if tra- 
velling, they economise motion to a degree that is weari- 
some to the eye. 

Words are limited, and the description of scenery becomes 
tiresome. It is a fault that the sense of beauty, freshening- 
constantly on the traveller, compels him who makes a note 
of impressions to mark every other line with the same ever- 
recurring exclamations of pleasure. I saw a hundred miles 
of unrivalled scenery in Styria, and how can I describe it? 
It were keeping silence on a world of enjoyment to pass it 
over. We come to a charming descent into a valley. The 
town beneath, the river, the embracing mountains, the 
swell to the ear of its bells ringing some holiday, affect my 
imagination powerfully. I take out my tablets. What \ 
shall I say ? How convey to your minds, who have not 
seen it, the charm of a scene I can only describe as I have 
described a thousand others? 



GIIATZ. 135 



LETTER XXV. 

GRAlZ VIENNA ST. ETIEXXE THE TOMB OF THE SON OF 

NAPOLEON. 

Jul* ir>, 1853. 

We had followed stream after stream through a succession 
of delicious valleys for a hundred miles. Descending from 
a slight eminence, we came upon the broad and rapid Muhr, 
and soon after caught sight of a distant citadel upon a rock. 
As we approached, it struck me as one of the most singular 
freaks of nature I had ever seen. A pyramid, perhaps three 
hundred feet in height, and precipitous on every side, rose 
abruptly in the midst of a broad and level plain, and 
around it, in a girdle of architecture, lay the capital of 
Styria. The fortress on the summit hung like an eagle's 
nest over the town, and from its towers a pistol-shot would 
reach the outermost point of the wall. 

Wearied with travelling near three hundred miles with- 
out sleep, I dropped upon a bed at the hotel, with an order 
to be called in two hours. It was noon, and we were to 
remain at Gratz till the next morning. My friend, the 
Hungarian, had promised, as he threw himself on the op- 
posite bed, to wake and accompany me in a walk through 
the town ; but the shake of a stout German chambermaid 
at the appointed time had no effect upon him, and I de- 
scended to my dinner alone. I had lost my interpreter. 
The carte was in German, of which I did not know even 
the letters. After appealing in vain in French and Italian 
to the persons eating near me, I fixed my finger at hazard 
upon a word, and the waiter disappeared. The result was 
a huge dish of cabbage cooked in some filthy oil and graced 
with a piece of beef. I was hesitating whether to dine on 
bread or make another attempt, when a gentlemanlike man 
of some fifty years came in and took the vacant seat at my 
table. He addressed me immediately in French, and, 
smiling at my difficulties, undertook to order a dinner for 
me something less national. We improved our acquaint- 
ance with a bottle of Johannesberg, and after dinner he 



136 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

kindly offered to accompany me in my walk through the 
city. 

Gratz is about the size of Boston ; a plain German city, 
with little or no pretensions to style. The military, band 
was playing a difficult waltz very beautifully in the public 
square, but no one was listening except a group of young 
men dressed in the worst taste of dandyism. We mounted 
by a zig-zag path to the fortress. On a shelf of the preci- 
pice halfway up, hangs a small casino used as a beer-shop. 
The view from the summit was a feast to the eye. The 
wide and lengthening valley of the Muhr lay asleep be- 
neath its loads of grain, its villas and farm-houses the pic- 
ture of " waste and mellow fruitfulness ;" the rise to the 
mountains around the head of the valley was clustered with 
princely dwellings ; thick forests with glades between them, 
and churches with white slender spires shooting from the 
bosom of elms ; and right at our feet, circling around the 
precipitous rock for protection, lay the city enfolded in its 
rampart, and sending up to our ears the sound of every 
wheel that rolled through her streets. Among the striking 
buildings below, my friend pointed out to me a palace 
which he said had been lately purchased by Joseph Bona- 
parte, who was coming here to reside. The people were 
beginning to turn out for their evening walk upon the ram- 
parts, which are planted with trees and laid out for a pro- 
menade, and we descended to mingle in the crowd. 

My old friend had a great many acquaintances. He 
presented me to several of the best-dressed people we met, 
all of whom invited me to supper. I had been in Italy 
almost a year and a half, and such a thing had never hap- 
pened to me. We walked about until six, and as I pre- 
ferred going to the play, which opened at that early hour, 
we took tickets for JDer Schlimme Leisel, and were seated 
presently in one of the simplest and prettiest theatres I 
have ever seen. 

JDer Schlimme Leisel was an old maid who kept house 
for an old batchelor brother, proposing, at the time the 
play opens, to marry. Her dislike to the match, from the 
dread of losing her authority over his household, formed 
the humour of the piece, and was admirably represented. 
After various unsuccessful attempts to prevent the nuptials, 



GRATZ. 137 

the lady is brought to the house, and the old maid enters in 
a towering passion, throws down her keys, and flirts out of 
the room with a threat that she (i will go to America ! '* 
Fortunately she is not driven to that extremity. The lady 
has been already married secretly to a poorer lover ; and 
the old bachelor, after the first shock of the discovery, 
settles a fortune on them, and returns to his celibacy and 
his old maid sister, to the satisfaction of all parties. Cer- 
tainly the German is the most unmusical language of 
Babel. If my good old friend had not translated it for me 
word for word, I should scarce have believed the play to 
be more than a gibbering pantomime. I shall think differ- 
ently when I have learned it, no doubt, but a strange lan- 
guage strikes upon one's ear so oddly ! I was too tired 
when the play was over, (which, by the way, was at the 
sober hour of nine,) to accept any of the kind invitations 
of which my companion reminded me. We supped tete-d- 
iete, instead, at the hotel. I was delighted with my new 
acquaintance. He was an old citizen of the world. He 
had left Gratz at twenty, and, after thirty years wander- 
ing from one part of the globe to the other, had returned 
to end his days in his birthplace. His relations were all 
dead ; and, speaking all the languages of Europe, he pre- 
ferred living at an hotel for the society of strangers. With 
a great deal of wisdom, he had preserved his good-humour 
towards the world; and I think I have rarely seen a kinder 
and never a happier man. I parted from him with regret, 
and the next morning at daylight had resumed my seat in 
the Eil-waggon. 

Imagine the Hudson, at the highlands, reduced to a 
sparkling little river a bowshot across, and a rich valley 
threaded by a road occupying the remaining space between 
the mountains, — and you have the scenery for the first 
thirty miles beyond Gratz. There is one more difference. 
On the edge of one of the most towering precipices, clear 
up against the clouds, hang the ruins of a noble castle. The 
rents in the wall, and the embrasures in the projecting tur~ 
rets, seem set into the sky. Trees and vines grow within 
and about it, and the lacings of the twisted roots seem all 
that keep it together. It is a perfect " castle in the air." 

A long day's journey and another long night (during 



138 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

which we passed Neustadt, on the confines of Hungary,), 
brought us within sight of Baden, but an hour or two from 
Vienna. It was just sun-rise, and market-carts, and pedes- 
trians, and suburban vehicles of all descriptions notified us 
of our approach to a great capital. A few miles farther 
we were stopped in the midst of an extensive plain by a, 
crowd of carriages. A criminal was about being guillo- 
tined. What was that to one who saw Vienna for the first 
time? A few steps farther the postilion was suddenly 
stopped. A gentleman alighted from a carriage in which 
were two ladies, and opened the door of the diligence. It 
was the bride of the soldier- apothecary come to meet him 
with her mother and brother. He was buried in dust, just 
waked out of sleep, a three days' beard upon his foee, and, 
at the best, not a very lover- like person. He ran to the 
carriage-door, jumped in, and there was an immediate cry 
for water. The bride had fainted ! We left her in his 
arms and drove on. The courier had no bowels for love. 

There is a small Gothic pillar before us, on the rise of a 
slight elevation. Thence we shall see Vienna. Stop, thou 
tasteless postilion ! Was ever such a scene revealed to 
mortal sight ? It is like Paris from the Barriere de VEtoile 
— it seems to cover the world. What is that broad water 
on which the rising sun glances so brightly ? The Danube ! 
What is that unparalleled Gothic structure piercing the 
sky ? What columns are these ? What spires ? Beautiful ! 
beautiful city ! 

i)5 ^? * %r ^ 3«? 

It must be a fine city that impresses one with its splendour 
before breakfast, after driving all night in a mail-coach. It 
was six o'clock in the morning when I left the post-office in 
Vienna, to walk to an hotel. The shops were still shut, 
the milk- women were beating at the gates, and the short, 
quick ring upon the church-bells summoned all early risers 
to mass. A sudden turn brought me upon a square. In 
its centre stood one of the most imposing fabrics that has 
ever yet filled my eye. It looked like the structure of a 
giant, encrusted by fairies — a majestically proportioned 
mass, and a spire tapering to the clouds, but a surface so 
curiously beautiful, so traced and fretted, so full of exqui- 
site ornament, that it seemed rather some curious cabinet 



VIENNA. 139 

gem seen through a magnifier, than a building in the open 
air. In these foreign countries, the labourer goes in with 
his load to pray, and I did not hesitate to enter the splendid 
church of St. Etienne, though a man followed me with a 
portmanteau on his back. What a wilderness of arches ! 
Pulpits, chapels, altars, ciboriums, confessionals, choirs, all 
in the exquisite slenderness of Gothic tracery, and all o 
one venerable and time-worn die, as if the incense of a 
myriad censers had steeped them in their spicy odours* 
The mass was chaunting, and hundreds were on their knees- 
about me, and not one without some trace that he had come 
in on his way to his daily toil. It was the hour of the 
poor man's prayer. The rich were asleep in their beds. 
The glorious roof over their heads, the costly and elaborated 
pillars against which they pressed their foreheads, the music 
and the priestly service, were, for that hour, theirs alone. 
I seldom have felt the spirit of a place of worship so strong 
upon me. 

The foundations of St. Etienne were laid seven hundred 
years ago. It has twice been partly burnt, and has been 
embellished in succession by nearly all the emperors of Ger- 
many. Among its many costly tombs, the most interesting. 
is that of the hero Eugene of Savoy, erected by his niece, 
the Princess Therese, of Lichtenstein. There is also a 
vault in which it is said, in compliance with an old custom, 
the entrails of all the emperors are deposited. 

Having marked thus much upon my tablets, I remem- 
bered the patient porter of my baggage, who had taken the 
opportunity to drop on his knees while I was gazing about,, 
and, having achieved his matins, was now waiting submis- 
sively till I was ready to proceed. A turn or two brought 
us to the hotel, where a bath and a breakfast soon restored 
me, and in an hour I was again on the way, with a valet 
de place, to visit the tomb of the son of Napoleon. 

He lies in the deep vaults of the Capuchin convent, with 
eighty-four of the imperial family of Austria beside him. 
A monk answered our pull at the cloister-bell, and the 
valet translated my request into German. He opened the 
gate with a guttural " Yaw ! " and lighting a wax candle at 
a iamp burning before the image of the Virgin, unlocked a 
massive brazen door at the end of the corridor, and led the 



140 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

way into the vault. The Capuchin was as pale as marble, 
-quite bald, though young, and with features which ex- 
pressed, I thought, the subdued fierceness of a devil. He 
impatiently waved away the officious interpreter after a 
moment or two, and asked me if I understood Latin. 
Nothing could have been more striking than the whole 
scene. The immense bronze sarcophagi lay in long aisles 
behind railings and gates of iron ; and as the long-robed 
monk strode on with his lamp through the darkness, pro- 
nouncing the name and title of each as he unlocked the 
door and struck it with his heavy key, he seemed to me, 
with his solemn pronunciation, like some mysterious being 
calling forth the imperial tenants to judgment. He ap- 
peared to have a something of scorn in his manner as he 
looked on the splendid workmanship of the vast coffin, and 
pronounced the sounding titles of the ashes within. At 
that of the celebrated Empress Maria Theresa alone, he 
stopped to make a comment. It was a simple tribute to 
lier virtues, and he uttered it slowly, as if he were merely 
musing to himself. He passed on to her husband, Francis 
the First, and then proceeded uninterruptedly till he came 
to a new copper coffin. It lay in a niche beneath a tall, 
dim window ; and the monk, merely pointing to the in- 
scription, set down his lamp, and began to pace up and 
down the damp floor, with his head on his breast, as if it 
was a matter of course that here I was to be left awhile to 
my thoughts, 

It was certainly the spot, if there is one in the world, 
to feel emotion. In the narrow enclosure on which my 
finger rested lay the last hopes of Napoleon. The heart of 
the master-spirit of the world was bound up in these ashes. 
He was beautiful, accomplished, generous, brave. He was 
loved with a sort of idolatry by the nation with which he 
had passed his childhood. He had won all hearts. His 
death seemed impossible. There was a universal prayer 
that he might live ; his inheritance of glory was so incal- 
culable. 

I read his epitaph. It was that of a private individual. It 
gave his name, and his father's and mother's and then enume- 
rated his virtues, with a common-place regret for his early 
death. The monk took up his lamp and re-ascended to the 



THE EMPEROR'S STABLES. 141 

doister in silence. He shut the convent-door behind me, 
and the busy street seemed to me profane. How short a 
time does the most moving event interrupt the common 
current of life ! 



LETTER XXVI. 
VIENNA. 

-THE YOUNG QUEEN OP 

HUNGARY THE PALACE HALL OF CURIOSITIES, JEWELLERY, 

&C— THE POLYTECHNIC SCHOOL GEOMETRICAL FIGURES DE- 
SCRIBED BY THE VIBRATIONS OF MUSICAL NOTES— LIBERAL 
PROVISION FOR ' THE PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS — POPULARITY OF 
THE EMPEROR. 

July 24, 1833. 

I had quite forgotten, in packing up my little portmanteau 
to leave the ship, that I was coming so far north. Scarce 
a week ago, in the south of Italy, we were panting in linen 
jackets. I find myself shivering here, in a latitude five 
hundred miles north of Boston, with no remedy but exer- 
cise and an extra shirt, for a cold that would grace De- 
cember. 

It is amusing, sometimes, to abandon one's self to a valet 
de place. Compelled to resort to one from my ignorance 
of the German, I have fallen upon a dropsical fellow, with 
a Bardolph nose, whose French is execrable, arid whose 
selection of objects of curiosity is worthy of his appearance. 
His first point was the emperor's stables. We had walked 
a mile and a half to see them. Here were two or three 
hundred horses of all breeds, in a building that the emperor 
himself might live in, with a magnificent inner court for a 
circus, and a wilderness of grooms, dogs and other appurte- 
nances. I am as fond of a horse as most people, but with 
all Vienna before me, and little time to lose, I broke into 
the midst of the head groom's pedigrees, and requested to 
be shown the way out. Monsieur Karl did not take the 
hint. We walked on half a mile, and stopped before another 
large building. " What is this ? " — " The imperial carriage- 
house, Monseigneur." I was about turning on my heel and 



142 PEXCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

taking my liberty into my own hands, when the large door 
flew open, and the blaze of gilding from within turned me 
from my purpose. I thought I had seen the ne plus ultra 
of equipages at Rome. The imperial family of Austria ride 
m more style than his Holiness. The models are lighter 
and handsomer, while the gold and crimson is put on quite 
as resplendently. The most curious part of the show were 
ten or twelve state traineaux, or sleighs. I can conceive 
nothing more brilliant than a turn out of these magnificent 
structures upon the snow. They are built with aerial 
lightness, of gold and sable, with the seat fifteen or twenty 
feet from the ground, and are driven, with two or four 
horses, by the royal personage himself. The grace of their 
shape and the splendour of the-ir gilded trappings are incon- 
ceivable to one who has never seen them. 

Our way lay through the court of the imperial palace. 
A large crowd was collected round a carriage with four 
horses standing at the side-door. As we approached it, all 
hats flew off, and a beautiful woman, of perhaps twenty- 
eight, came down the steps, leading a handsome boy of two 
-or three years. It was the young queen of Hungary and 
her son. If I had seen such a face in a cottage ornee on 
the borders of an American lake, I should have thought it 
made for the spot. 

We entered a door of the palace at which stood a ferocious- 
looking Croat sentinel, near seven feet high Three Ger- 
man travelling students had just been refused admittance. 
A little man appeared at the ring of the bell within, and 
after a preliminary explanation by my valet, probably a lie, 
he made a low bow and invited me to enter. I waited a 
moment, and a permission was brought me to see the im- 
perial treasury. Handing it to Karl, I requested him to 
get permission inserted for my three friends at the door. 
He accomplished it in the same incomprehensible manner in 
which he had obtained my own, and introducing them with 
the ill-disguised contempt of a valet for all men with dusty 
coats, we commenced the rounds of the curiosities together. 

A large clock lacing us, as we entered, was just striking. 
From either side of its base, like companies of gentlemen 
and ladies advancing to greet each other, appeared figures 
in the dress and semblance of the royal family of Austria, 



IMPERIAL TREASURY. 1£& 

who remained a moment, and then retired, bowing them- 
selves courteously out backwards. It is a costly affair, pre- 
sented by the landgrave of Hesse to Maria Theresa, in 
1750. 

After a succession of watches, snuff-boxes, necklaces, and 
jewels of every description, we came to the famous Floren- 
tine diamond, said to be the largest in the world. It was 
lost by a duke of Burgundy upon the battle-field of Granson, 
found by a soldier, who parted with it for five florins, sold 
again, and found its way at last to the royal treasury of 
Florence, whence it was brought to Vienna. Its weight is 
one hundred and thirty nine and a-half carats, and it i$ 
estimated at one million forty-three thousand three hundred 
and thirty-four florins. It looks like a lump of light. 
Enormous diamonds surround it, but it hangs among them 
like Hesperus among the stars. 

The next side of the gallery is occupied by specimens of 
carved ivory. Many of them are antique, and half of them 
are more beautiful than decent. There were two bas- 
reliefs among them by Raphael Donner, which were worth, 
to my eye, all the gems in the gallery. They were taken 
from Scripture, and represented the Woman of Samaria at 
the well, and Hagar waiting for the death of her son. No 
powers of elocution, no enhancement of poetry, could bring 
those touching passages of the Bible so movingly to the 
heart. The latter particularly arrested me. The melancholy 
beauty of Hagar, sitting with her head bowed upon her 
knees, while her boy is lying a little way off, beneath a 
shrub of the desert, is a piece of unparalleled workmanship. 
It may well hang in the treasury of an emperor. 

Miniatures of the royal family in their childhood, set in 
costly gems ; massive plate curiously chased ; services of 
gold, robes of diamonds, gem -hiked swords, dishes wrought 
of solid integral agates, and finally the crown and sceptre of 
Austria upon red velvet cushions, looking very much like 
their imitations on the stage, were among the world of 
splendour unfolded to our eyes. The Florentine diamond 
and the bas-reliefs by Raphael Donner were all I coveted. 
The beauty of the diamond was royal. It needed no 
imagination to feel its value. A savage would pick it up 
in a desert for a star dropped out of the sky. For the rest. 



144 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

the demand on my admiration fatigued me, and I was glad 
to escape with my dusty friends from the university, and 
exchange courtesies in the free air. One of them spoke 
English a little, and called me ' '■ Meester Englishman " on 
bidding me adieu. I was afraid of a beer-shop scene in 
Vienna, and did not correct the mistake. 

As we were going out of the court, four covered waggons, 
drawn each by four superb horses, dashed through the gate. 
I waited a moment to see what they contained. Thirty or 
forty servants in livery came out from the palace, and took 
from the waggons quantities of empty baskets carefully 
labelled with directions. They were from Schoenbrunn, 
where the emperor is at present residing with his court, and 
had come to market for the imperial kitchen. It should be 
a good dinner that requires sixteen such horses to carry to 
the cook. 

It was the hungry hour of two, and I was still musing 
on the emperor s dinner, and admiring the anxious interest 
his servitors took in their disposition of the baskets, when a 
blast of military music came to my ear. It was from the 
barracks of the Imperial Guard, and I stepped under the 
arch, and listened to them an hour. How gloriously they 
played ! It was probably the finest band in Austria. I 
have heard much good music, but of its kind this was like 
a new sensation to me. They stand, in playing, just under 
the window at which the emperor appears dai]y when in 
the city. 

I have been indebted to Mr. Schwartz, the American 
consul at Vienna, for a very unusual degree of kindness. 
Among other polite attentions, he procured for me to-day 
an admission to the Polytechnic school — a favour granted 
with difficulty, except at the appointed days for pubh> 
visits. 

The Polytechnic School was established in 181 6 by the 
present emperor. The building stands outside the rampart 
of the city, of elegant proportions, and about as large as all 
the buildings of Yale or Harvard College thrown into one. 
its object is to promote instruction in the practical sciences, 
or, in other words, to give a practical education for the 
trades, commerce, or manufactures. It is divided into three 
departments. The first is preparatory, and the course go 



POLYTECHNIC SCHOOL. 145 

cupies two years. The studies are religion and morals, 
elementary mathematics, natural history, geography, uni- 
versal history, grammar, and " the German style," declama- 
tion, drawing, writing, and the French, Italian, and Bohe- 
mian languages. To enter this class, the boy must be 
thirteen years of age, and pays fifty cents per month. 

The second course is commercial, and occupies one year. 
The studies are mercantile correspondence, commercial law, 
mercantile arithmetic, the keeping of books, geography and 
history, as they relate to commerce, acquaintance with mer- 
chandise, &c. &c. 

The third course lasts one year. The studies are chemistry 
as applicable to arts and trades, the fermentation of woods, 
tannery, soap-making, dyeing, blanching, &c. &c. ; also 
mechanism, practical' geometry, civil architecture, hydraulics, 
and technology. The two last courses are given gratis. 

The whole is under the direction of a principal, who has 
under him thirty professors and two or three guardians of 
apparatus. 

We were taken first into a noble hall, lined with glass 
cases containing specimens of every article manufactured in 
the German dominions. From the finest silks down to 
sh)es, wigs, nails, and mechanics* tools, here were all the 
products of human labour. The variety was astonishing. 
Within the limits of a single room, the pupil is here made 
acquainted with every mechanic art known in his country. 

The next hall was devoted to models, Here was every 
kind of bridge, fortification, lighthouse, dry-dock, break- 
water, canal-lock, &c. &c. ; models of steamboats, of ships, 
and of churches, in every style of architecture. It was a 
little world. 

We went thence to the chemical apartment. The servitor 
here — a man without education — has constructed all the 
apparatus. He is an old gray-headed man, of a keen Ger- 
man countenance, and great simplicity of manners. He 
takes great pride in having constructed the largest and 
most complete chemical apparatus now in London. The 
one which he exhibited to us occupies the whole of an im- 
mense hall, and produces an electric discharge like the 
report of a pistol. The ordinary batteries in our universities 
are scarce a twentieth part as powerful. 

L 



146 PENCILLING3 BY THE WAY. 

After showing us a variety of experiments, the old man 
turned suddenly and asked us if we knew the geometrical 
figures described by the vibrations of musical notes. We 
confessed our ignorance, and he produced a pane qf glass 
covered with black sand. He then took a fiddle-bow, and, 
holding the glass horizontally, drew it downwards against 
the edge at a peculiar angle. The sand flew as if it had 
been bewitched, and took the shape of a perfect square. He 
asked us to name a figure. We named a circle. Another 
careful draw of the bow, and the sand flew into a circle, 
with scarce a particle out of its perfect curve. Twenty 
times he repeated the experiment, and with the most com- 
plicated figures drawn on paper. He had reduced it to an 
art. It would have burnt him for a magician a century 

However one condemns the policy of Austria with respect 
to her subject provinces and the rest of Europe, it is impos- 
sible not to be struck with her liberal provision for her own 
immediate people. The public institutions of all kinds in 
Vienna are allowed to be the finest and most liberally 
endowed on the Continent. Her hospitals, prisons, houses 
of industry, and schools, are on an imperial scale of munifi- 
cence. The emperor himself is a father to his subjects, and 
every tongue blesses him. Napoleon envied him their 
affection, it is said, and certainly no monarch could be more 
universally beloved. 



END OV THE FIIIST V01 t V&lY« 



VOLUME THE SECOND. 



LETTER I, 



vienna, palaces and gardens mosaic copy of da vinci s 

" last supper" collection of warlike antiquities; 

scanderburg's sword, montezuma's tomahawk, relics of 
the crusaders, warriors in armour, the farmer of 

augsburgii room of portraits of celebrated individuals 

gold busts of jupiter and juno the glacts, full 

of gardens, the general resort of people — universal 
spirit of enjoyment — simplicity and confidence in the 
manners of the viennese baden. 

July 25, 1855. 

At the foot of a hill in one of the beautiful suburbs of 
Vienna, stands a noble palace called the Lower Belvedere. 
On the summit of the hill stands another, equally magni- 
ficent, called the Upper Belvedere, and between the two 
extend broad and princely gardens, open to the public. 

On the lower floor of the entrance-hall in the former 
palace lies the copy, in mosaic, of Leonardo da Vinci's 
iC Last Supper," done at Napoleon's order. Though sup- 
posed to be the finest piece of mosaic in the world, it is 
so large that they have never found a place for it. A 
temporary balcony has been erected on one side of the room, 
and the spectator mounts nearly to the ceiling to get a fair 
position for looking down upon it. That unrivalled picture, 
now going to decay in the convent at Milan, will probably 
depend upon this copy for its name with posterity. The 
expression in the faces of the apostles is as accurately pre- 
served as in the admirable engraving of Morghen. 

The remaining halls in the palace are occupied by & 



148 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

grand collection of antiquities, principally of a warlike 
character. When I read in my old worm-eaten Burton, of 
w< Scanderburg's strength/' I never thought to see his sword. 

It stands here against the wall, a long straight weapon 
with a cross hilt, which few men could heave to their 
shoulders. The tomahawk of poor Montezuma hangs near 
it. It was presented to the emperor by the king of Spain- 
It is of a dark granite, and polished very beautifully. 
What a singular curiositv to find in Austria ! 

.The windows are draped with flags dropping in pieces 
with age. This, so in tatters, was renowned in the crusades. 
It was carried to the Holy Land and brought back by the 
Archduke Ferdinand. 

A hundred warriors in bright armour stand round the 
hall. Their vizors are down, their swords in their hands, 
their feet planted for a spring. One can scarce believe 
there are no men in them. The name of some renowned 
soldier is attached to each. This was the armour of the 
cruel Visconti of Milan — that of Duke Alba of Florence — 
both costly suits, beautifully inlaid with gold. In the 
centre of the room stands a gigantic fellow in full armoui, 
with a sword on his thigh and a beam in his right hand. 
It is the shell of the famous farmer of Augsburg, who was 
in the service of one of the emperors. He was over eight 
feet in height, and limbed in proportion. How near such 
relics bring history ! With what increased facility one 
pictures the warrior to his fancy, seeing his sword, ana 
hearing the very rattle of his armour. Yet it puts one into 
Hamlet's vein to see a contemptible valet lay his hand with 
impunity on the armed shoulder, shaking the joints that 
once belted the soul of a Visconti ! I turned, in leaving 
the room, to take a second look at the flag of the Crusade. 
It had floated, perhaps, over the helmet of Cceur de Lion.. 
Saladin may have had it in his eye, assaulting the Christian 
camp with his pagans. 

In the next room hung fifty or sixty portraits of cele- 
brated individuals, presented in their time to the emperors 
of Austria. There was one of Mary of Scotland. It is a 
face of superlative loveliness, taken with a careless and 
most bewitching half smile, and yet not without the look of 
royalty, which one traces in all the pictures of the unfortu- 



BELVEDERE GALLERY, 1 4J) 

nate queen. One of the emperors of Germany married 
Phillippina, a farmer's daughter, and here is her portrait. 
It is done in the prim old style of the middle ages, but the 
face is full of character. Her husband's portrait hangs 
beside it, and she looks more born for an emperor than he. 

Hall after hall followed, of costly curiosities. A volume 
would not describe them. Two gold busts of Jupiter and 
Juno, by Benvenuto Cellini, attracted my attention par- 
ticularly. They were very beautiful, but I would copy 
them in bronze, and coin the thunderer and his queen, 
were they mine. 

Admiration is the most exhausting thing in the world. 
The servitor opened a gate leading into the gardens of the 
palace that we might mount to the Upper Belvedere, 
which contains the imperial gallery of paintings. But I 
had no more strength. I could have dug in the field till 
dinner-time — but to be astonished more than three hours 
without respite is beyond me. I took a stroll in the garden* 
How delightfully the unmeaning beauty of a fountain 
refreshes one after this inward fatigue! I walked on, up 
one alley and down another, happy in finding nothing that 
surprised me. or worked upon my imagination, or bothered 
my historical recollection, or called upon my worn-out su- 
perlatives for expression. I fervently hoped not to have 

another new sensation till after dinner. 

****** 

Vienna is an immense city, (two hundred and fifty 
thousand inhabitants,) but its heart only is walled in. You 
may walk from gate to gate in twenty minutes. In leaving 
the walls you come upon a feature of the city which dis- 
tinguishes it from every other in Europe. Its rampart is 
encircled by an open park, (called the Glacis), a quarter of 
a mile in width and perhaps three miles in circuit, which is 
in fact in the centre of Vienna. The streets commence 
again on the other side of it, and on going from one part of 
the city to the other, you constantly cross this lovely belt of 
verdure, which girds her heart like a cestus of health. The 
top of the rampart itself is planted with trees, and, com- 
manding beautiful views in every direction, it is generally 
thronged with people. (It was a favourite walk of the 
duke of Reichstadt.) Between this and the Glacis lies a 



!- 



150 PENCILLING S BY THE WAY. 

deep trench, crossed by draw-bridges at every gate, the 
bottom of which is cultivated prettily as a flower-garden. 
Altogether Vienna is a beautiful city. Paris may have 
single views about the Tuilleries that are finer than any* 
thing of the same kind here, but this capital of western 
Europe, as a whole, is quite the most imposing city 1 have 
seen. 

The Glacis is full of gardens. I requested my disagree- 
able necessity of a valet, this afternoon, to take me to two 
or three of the most general resorts of the people. We 
passed out by one of the city gates, five minutes' walk from 
the hotel, and entered immediately into a crowd of people, 
sauntering up and down under the alleys of the Glacis. 
A little farther on we found a fanciful building, 
buried in trees, and occupied as a summer cafe. In a little 
circular temple in front was stationed a band of music, and 
around it for a considerable distance were placed small 
tables, filled just now with elegantly dressed people, eating 
ices or drinking coffee. It was in every respect like a 
private fete champetre. I wandered about for an hour, 
expecting involuntarily to meet some acquaintance — 
there was such a look of kindness and unreserve 
throughout. It is a desolate feeling to be alone in such a 
crowd. 

We jumped into a carriage and drove round the Glacis 
for a mile, passing everywhere crowds of people idling 
leisurely along, and evidently out for pleasure. We stopped 
before a superb facade, near one of the gates of the city. 
It was the entrance to the Volksgarten. We entered in 
front of a fountain, and, turning up a path to the left, 
found our way almost impeded by another crowd. A 
semicircular building, with a range of columns in front 
encircling a stand for a band of music, was surrounded by 
perhaps two or three thousand people. Small tables and 
seats under trees were spread in every direction within reach 
of the music. The band played charmingly. Waiters in 
white jackets and aprons were running to and fro, receiving 
and obeying orders for refreshments, and here again all 
seemed abandoned to one spirit of enjoyment. I had 
thought we must have left all Vienna at the other garden. 
I wondered how so many people could be spared from their 



Q4H0b»s» 151 

occupations and families. It was no holiday. " It is 
always as gay in fair weather/' said Karl. 

A little back into the garden stands a beautiful little 
structure, on the model of the temple of Theseus, in Greece, 
It was built for Canova's group of w Theseus and the 
Centaur/' bought by the Emperor. I had seen copies of it in 
Rome, but was of course much more struck with the original. 
It is a noble piece of sculpture. 

Still farther back, on the rise of a mount, stood another 
fanciful cafe, with another band of music — and another 
crowd ! After we had walked around it, my man w T as 
hurrying me away. " You have not seen the Augarten," 
said he. It stands upon a little green island in the Danube, 
and is more extensive than either of the others. But I was 
content where I was; and, dismissing, my Asmodeus, I 
determined to spend the evening wandering about in the 
crowds alone. The sun went down, the lamps were lit, 
the alleys were illuminated, the crowd increased, and the 
emperor himself could not have given a gayer evening's 
entertainment. 

Vienna has the reputation of being the most profligate 
capital in Europe. Perhaps it is so. There is certainly, 
even to a stranger, no lack of temptation to every species of 
pleasure. But there is, besides, a degree of simplicity 
and confidence in the manners of the Viennese which I had 
believed peculiar to America, and inconsistent with the 
state of society in Europe. In the most public resorts, and 
at all hours of the day and evening, modest and respectable 
young women of the middle classes walk alone perfectly 
secure from molestation. They sit under the trees in these 
public gardens, eat ices at the cafes, walk home unattended, 
and no one seems to dream of impropriety. Whole families, 
too, spend the afternoon upon a seat in a thronged place of 
resort, their children playing about them, the father reading, 
and the mother sewing or knitting, quite unconscious of 
observation. The lower and middle classes live all summer, 
I am told, out of doors. It is never oppressively warm in 
this latitude, and their houses are deserted after three or four 
o'clock in the afternoon, and the whole population pours 
out to the different gardens on the Glacis, where, till mid- 
nighty they seem perfectly happy in the enjoyment of the 



152 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

innocent and unexpensive pleasures which a wise govern- 
ment has provided for them. 

The nobles and richer class pass their summer in the 
circle of rural villages near the city. They are nested 
about on the hills, and crowded with small and lovely rural 
villas, more like the neighbourhood of Boston than anything 
I have seen in Europe. 

Baden, where the emperor passes much of his time, is 
called " the miniature Switzerland/' Its baths are excel- 
lent, its hills are cut into retired and charming walks, and 
from June till September it is one of the gayest of watering- 
places. It is about a two hours' drive from the city, and 
omnibuses, at a very low rate, run between at all times of 
the day. The Austrians seldom travel, and the reason is 
evident — they have every thing for which others travel, at 
home. 



LETTER II. 

VIENNA -THE PALACE OF LIECHTENSTEIN GALLERIES. 

July, 1833. 

The red-nosed German led on through the crowded 
Graben, jostling aside the Parisian-looking lady and her 
handsome Hungarian cavalier, the phlegmatic smoker and 
the bearded turk alike. We passed the Imperial Guard, 
the city gate, the lofty bridge over the trench, (casting a 
look below at the flower-garden laid out in " the ditch M 
which encircles the wall,) and entered upon the lovely 
Glacis — one step from the crowded street to the fresh 
greenness of a park. 

Would you believe, as you walk up this shaded alley, that 
vou are in the heart of the citv still ? 

The Glacis is crossed, with its groups of fair children and 
shy maids, its creeping invalids, its solitude-seeking lovers, 
and its idling soldiers, and we again enter the crowded 
street. A half-hour more, and the throng thins again, the 
country opens, and here you are, in front of the palace of 
Liechstenstein, the first ncVU* of Au?ria. A modern build 



THE LIECHTENSTEIN. 153 

ing, of beautiful and light architecture, rises from its 
clustering trees ; servants in handsome livery hang about 
the gates and lean against the pillars of the portico, and 
with an explanation from my lying valet, who evidently 
makes me out an ambassador at least by the ceremony with 
which I am received, a gray servitor makes his appearance 
and opens the immense glass door leading from the side of 
the court. 

One should step gingerly on the polished marble of this 
superb staircase ! It opens at once into a lofty hall, the 
ceiling of which is painted in fresco by ,an Italian master. 
It is a room of noble proportions. Few churcbes in America 
are larger, and yet it seems in keeping with the style of the 
palace, the staircase — every thing but the creature meant 
to inhabit it. 

How different are the moods in which one sees pictures ! 
To-day I am in the humour to give in to the painter's 
delusion. The scene is real. Asmodeus is at my elbow, 
snd I am witched from spot to spot, invisible myself, gazing 
on the varied scenes revealed only to the inspired vision of 
genius. 

A landscape opens.* It is one of the woody recesses of 
Lake Nemi, at the very edge of " Dian's Mirror." The 
huntress queen is bathing with her nymphs ; the sandal is 
half-laced over an ancle that seems fit for nothing less than 
to sustain a goddess, — when, casting her eye on the lovely 
troop emerging from the water, she sees the unfortunate 
Calista surrounded by her astonished sisters, and fainting 
with shame. Poor Calista ! one's heart pleads for her. But 
how expressive is the cold condemning look in the beautiful 
face of her mistress queen! Even the dogs have started 
from their reclining position on the grass, and stand gazing 
at the unfortunate, wondering at the silent astonishment of 
the virgin troop. Pardon her, imperial Dian ! 

Come to the baptism of a child ! It is a vision of Guido 
Reni's.-f A young mother, apparently scarce sixteen, has 
brought her first child to the altar. She kneels with it in 

* By Frauceschini. He passed his life with the Prince Liechstentein, and hi» 
pictures are found only in this collection. He is a delicious painter, full of 
poetry, with the one fault of too voluptuous a style. 

* One of the very loveliest pictures that divine painter ever drew. 



154 PENC1LLINGS BY THE WAY. 

her arms, looking earnestly into the face of the priest while 
he sprinkles the water on its pure forehead, and pronounces 
the words of consecration. It is a most lovely countenance, 
made lovelier by the holy feeling in her heart. Her eyes 
are moist, her throat swells with emotion — my own sight 
dims while I gaze upon her. We have intruded on one of 
the most holy moments of nature. A band of girls, sisters 
by the resemblance, have accompanied the young mother, 
and stand, with love and wonder in their eyes, gazing on 
the face of the child. How strangely the mingled thoughts 
crowding through their minds, are expressed in their 
excited features. It is a scene worthy of an audience of 
angels. 

We have surprised Giorgione's wife (the " Flora " of 
Titian, the iS love in life" of Byron) looking at a sketch by 
her husband. It stands on his easel, outlined in crayons, 
and represents Lucretia the moment before she plunges the 
dagger into her bosom. She was passing through his 
studio, and you see by the half-suspended foot, that she 
stopped but for a momentary glance, and has forgotten her- 
self in thoughts that have risen unaware. The head of 
.Lucretia resembles her own, and she is wondering what 
Giorgione thought while he drew it. Did he resemble her 
to the Roman's wife in virtue as well as in feature ? There 
is an embarrassment in the expression of her face, as if she 
doubted he had drawn it half in mischief. We will leave 
the lovely Venetian to her thoughts. When she sits again 
to Titian, it will be with a colder modesty. 

Hoogstraeten, a Dutch painter, conjures up a scene for 
you. It is an old man, who has thrust his head through a 
prison-gate, and is looking into the street with the listless 
patience and curiosity of one whom habit has reconciled to 
his situation. His beard is neglected, his hair is slightly 
grizzled, and on his head sits a shabby fur cap, that has 
evidently shared all his imprisonment, and is quite past any 
pride of appearance. What a vacant face ! How perfectly 
he seems to look upon the street below, as upon something 
with which he has nothing more to do. There is no 
anxiety to get out, in its expression. He is past that. He 
looks at the playing children, and watches the zig-zag trot 
of an idle dog with the quiet apathy of one who can find 



PICTURES. 15& 

nothing better to help off the hour. It is a picture of solid r 
contented, unthinking misery. 

Look at this boy, standing impatiently on one foot at his 
mother's knee, while she pares an apple for him ! With 
what an amused and playful love she listens to his hurrying- 
entreaties, stealing a glance at him as he pleads, with a 
deeper feeling than he will be able to comprehend for years I 
It is one of the commonest scenes in life, yet how pregnant 
with speculation ! 

On — on — what an endless gallery ! I have seen twelve 
rooms with forty or fifty pictures in each, and there are 
thirteen halls more ! The delusion begins to fade. These 
are pictures merely. Beautiful ones, however ! If lan j 
guage could convey to your eye the impressions that this 
waste and wealth of beauty have conveyed to mine, I 
would write of every picture. There is not an indifferent 
one here. All Italy together has not so many works by the 
Flemish masters as are contained in this single gallery — 
certainly none so fine. A most princely fortune for many 
generations must have been devoted to its purchase. 

I have seen seven or eight things in all Italy by Cor- 
reggio. They were the gems of the galleries in which they 
exist, but always small, and seemed to me to want a certain 
finish. Here is a Correggio, a large picture, and no minia- 
ture ever had so elaborate a beauty. It melts into the eye. 
It is a conception of female beauty so very extraordinary, 
that it seems to me it must become, in the mind of every 
one who sees it, the model and the standard of all loveli- 
ness. It is a nude Venus, sitting lost in thought, with 
Cupid asleep in her lap. She is in the sacred retirement 
of solitude, and the painter has thrown into her attitude 
and expression so speaking an unconsciousness of all pre- 
sence, that you feel like a daring intruder while you gaze 
upon the picture, Surely such softness of colouring, such 
faultless proportions, such subdued and yet eloquent rich- 
ness of tint in the skin, was never before attained by mortal 
pencil. I am here, some five thousand miles from America,* 
yet would 1 have made the voyage but to raise my standard 
of beauty by this ravishing image of woman. 

In the circle of Italian galleries, one finds less of female 
beauty, both in degree and in variety, than his anticipation 



J5() PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

had promised. Three or four heads at the most, of the 
many hundreds that he sees, are imprinted in his memory, 
and serve as standards in his future observations. Even 
when standing before the most celebrated pictures, one often 
returns to recollections of living beauty in his own country, 
by which the most glowing head of Titian or the Veronese 
suffer in comparison. In my own experience this has been 
often true, and it is perhaps the only thing in which my 
imagination of foreign wonders was too fervent. To this 
Venus of Correggio's, however, I unhesitatingly submit all 
knowledge, all conception even, of female loveliness. I have 
seen nothing in life, imagined nothing from the description 
of poets, that is in any way comparable to it. It is 
matchless. 

In one of the last rooms the servitor unlocked two hand- 
some cases, and showed me, with a great deal of circum- 
stance, two heads by Denner. They were an old man and 
his wife — two hale, temperate, good old country gossips — 
"but so curiously finished ! Every pore was painted. You 
counted the stiff stumps of the good man s beard, as you 
might those of a living person, till you were tired. Every 
wrinkle looked as if a month had been spent in elaborating 
it. The man said they were extremely valuable, and I 
certainly never saw any thing more curiously and perhaps 
uselessly wrought. 

Near them was a capital picture of a drunken fellow, 
sitting by himself and laughing heartily at his own perform- 
ance on the pipe. It was irresistible, and I joined in the 
laugh till the long suite of halls rung again. 

Landscapes by Van Delen — such as I have seen engrav- 
ings of in America and sighed over as unreal — the skies, 
the temples, the water, the soft mountains, the distant 
ruins, seemed so like the beauty of a dream. Here they 
recall to me even lovelier scenes in Italy — atmospheres 
richer than the painter's pallet can imitate, and ruins and 
temples whose ivy-grown and melancholy grandeur are but 
feebly copied at the best. 

Come, Karl ! I am bewildered with these pictures. You 
have twenty such galleries in Vienna, you say ! I have 
seen enough for to-day, however, and we will save the 
Belvedere till to-morrow. Here ! pay the servitor and the 



THE PALACE OF SCHOENBRUNN. 157 

footman and the porter, and let us get into the open air. 
How common look your Viennese after the celestial images 
we have left behind ! And, truly, this is the curse of 
refinement. The faces we should have loved else, look 
dul] ! The forms that were graceful before, move somehow 
heavily. I have entered a gallery ere now, thinking well 
of a face that accompanied me, and I have learned indiffer- 
ence to it, by sheer comparison, before coming away. 

We return through the Kohlmarket, one of the most 
fashionable streets of Vienna. It is like a fancy-ball. Hun- 
garians, Poles, Croats, Wallachians, Jews, Moldavians, 
Greeks, Turks, all dressed in their national and striking 
costumes, promenade up and down, smoking all, and none 
exciting the slightest observation. Everv third window is 
a pipe-shop, and they show, by their splendour and variety, 
the expensiveness of the passion. Some of them are marked 
" two hundred dollars." The streets reek with tobacco- 
smoke. You never catch a breath of untainted air within 
the Glacis. Your hotel, your cafe, your coach, your friend, 
are all redolent of the same disgusting odour. 



LETTER III. 

THE PALACE OF SCHOENBRUNN HIETZING, THE SUMMER RETREAT 

OF THE WEALTHY VIENNESE COUNTRY-HOUSE OF THE AME- 
RICAN CONSUL— SPECIMEN OF PURE DOMESTIC HAPPINESS IN A 

CERMAN FAMILY SPLENDID VILLAGE BALL SUBSTANTIAL 

FARE FOR THE LADIES — CURIOUS FASHION OF CUSHIONING THE 

WINDOWS — GERMAN GRIEF THE UPPER BELVEDERE PALACE 

ENDLESS QUANTITY OF PICTURES. 

July, 1833. 

Drove to Schoenbrunn. It is a princely palace, some three 
miles from the city, occupied at present by the emperor and 
his court. Napoleon resided here during his visit to Vienna, 
and here his son died — the two circumstances which alone 
make it worth much trouble to see. The afternoon was 
too cold to hope to meet the emperor in the grounds, and, 
being quite satisfied with drapery and modern paintings, I 



. 58 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

contented myself with having driven through the court, 
and kept on to Hietzing. 

This is a small village of country-seats within an hour's 
drive of the city — another Jamaica-Plains, or Dorchester 
in the neighbourhood of Boston. It is the summer retreat 
of most of the rank and fashion of Vienna. The American 
consul has here a charming country-house, buried in trees, 
where the few of our countrymen who travel to Austria 
find the most hospitable of welcomes. A bachelor friend of 
mine from New York is domesticated in the village with a 
Oerman family. I was struck with the Americanism of 
their manners. The husband and wife, a female relative 
and an intimate friend of the family, were sitting in the 
garden engaged in grave, quiet, sensible conversation. They 
had passed the afternoon together. Their manners were 
affectionate to each other, but serious and respectful. When 
I entered, they received me with kindness, and the conver- 
sation was politely changed to French, which they all spoke 
'fluently. Topics were started, in which it was supposed I 
-would be interested, and altogether the scene was one of 
the simplest and purest domestic happiness. This seems to 
you, I dare say, like the description of a very common 
thing, but I have not seen such a one before since I left my 

countrv. It is the first familv I have found in two vears 

■j ^ * 

travel who lived in, and seemed sufficient for, themselves. 
It came over me with a kind of feeling of refreshment. 

In the evening there was a ball at a public room in the 
"village. It was built in the rear of a cafe, to which we 
paid about thirty cents for entrance. I was not prepared 
for the splendour with which it was got up. The hall was 
very large and of beautiful proportions, built like the inte- 
rior of a temple, with columns on the four sides. A par- 
tition of glass divided it from a supper-room equally large, 
in which were set out perhaps fifty tables, furnished with a 
carte, from which each person ordered his supper when he 
wished it, after the fashion of a restaurant. The best band 
In Vienna filled the orchestra, led by the celebrated Strauss, 
who has been honoured for his skill with presents from half 
the monarchs of Europe. 

The ladies entered, dressed in perfect taste, d, la Pari- 
sienne, but the gentlemen (hear it, Basil Hall and Mrs. 



BALL AT HIETZING. T5f> 

Trollope !) came in frock-coats and boots, and danced with 
their hats on ! It was a public ball, and there was, of 
course, a great mixture of society ; but I was assured that 
it was attended constantly by the most respectable people of 
the village, and was as respectable as any thing of the kind 
in the middle classes. There were, certainly, many ladies 
in the company of elegant manners and appearance, and 
among the gentlemen I recognised two attaches to the 
French embassy, whom I had known in Paris, and several 
Austrian gentlemen of rank were pointed out to me among 
the dancers. The galopade and the waltz were the only 
dances, and dirty boots and hats to the contrary notwith- 
standing, it was the best waltzing I ever saw. They danced 
with a soul. 

The best part of it was the supper. They danced and 
eat — danced and eat, the evening through. It was quite 
the more important entertainment of the two. The most 
delicate ladies present returned three and four times to the 
supper, ordering fried chicken, salads, cold meats and beer, 
again and again, as if every waltz created a fresh appetite. 
The bill was called for ; the ladies assisted in making the 
change ; the tankard was drained, and off they strolled to 
the ball-room to engage with renewed spirit in the dance. 
And these, positively, were ladies who in dress, manners, 
and modest demeanour, might pass uncriticised in any 
society in the world ! Their husbands and brothers at- 
tended them, and no freedom was attempted, and I am sure 
it would not have been permitted even to speak to a lady 
without a formal introduction. 

We left most of the company supping at a late hour, 
and I drove into the city, amused with the ball, and recon- 
ciled to any or all of the manners which travellers in Ame- 
rica find so peculiarly entertaining. 

* * ■* # * * 

These cold winds from the Danube have given me a 
rheumatism. I was almost reconciled to it this morning, 
however, by a curtain-scene which I should have missed 
but for its annoyance. I had been driven out of my bed at 
daylight, and was walking my room between the door and 
the window, when a violent knocking in the street below 
arrested my attention. A respectable family occupies the 



t(}0 PENC1LLINGS BY THE WAY. 

house opposite, consisting of a father and mother and three 
daughters, the least attractive of whom has a lover. I 
cannot well avoid observing them whenever I am in my 
room, for every house in Vienna has a leaning cushion on 
the window for the elbows, and the ladies of all classes are 
upon them the greater part of the day. A handsome car- 
riage, servants in livery, and other circumstances, leave no 
doubt in my mind that my neighbours are rather of the 
better class. 

The lover stood at the street-door with a cloak on his 
arm, and a man at his side with his portmanteau. He 
was going on a journey and had come to take leave of his. 
mistress. He was let in by a gaping servant, who looked 
rather astonished at the hour he had chosen for his visit, 
hut the drawing-room windows were soon thrown open, 
and the lady made her appearance with her hair in papers- 
and other marks of a hasty toilet. My room is upon the 
same floor, and as I paced to and fro, the narrowness of the 
street in a manner forced them upon my observation. The 
scene was a very violent one, and the lady's tears flowed 
without restraint. After twenty partings at least, the 
lover scarce getting to the door before he returned to take 
another embrace, he finally made his exit, and the lady 
threw herself on a sofa and hid her face — for five minutes f 
I had begun to feel for her, although her swollen eyes 
added very unnecessarily to her usual plainness, when she 
rose and rang the bell. The servant appeared and disap- 
peared, and in a few minutes returned with a ham, a loaf 
of bread, and a mug of beer ! and down sits my senti- 
mental miss and consoles the agony of parting, with a meal 
that I would venture to substitute in quantity for any 
working man's lunch. 

I went to bed and rose at nine, and she was sitting at 
breakfast with the rest of the family, playing as good a 
knife and fork as her sisters, though, I must admit, with 
an expression of sincere melancholy in her countenance. 

The scene, I am told by my friend the consul, was per- 
fectly German. They eat a great deal, he says, in afflic- 
tion. The poet writes: 

" They are the silent griefs which cut the heart-striogs." 




£g 



t&Z^7?^2>7Z/ c^e^^97l 



p. 160. 



PICTURES. l6l 

For silent read hungry. 

****** 

The Upper Belvedere, a palace containing eighteen large 
rooms, filled with pictures. This is the imperial gallery, 
and the first in Austria. How can I give you an idea ot 
perhaps five hundred masterpieces ? You see here how, 
and by whom, Italy has been stripped. They have bought 
up all Flanders one would think, too. In one room here 
are twenty-eight superb Vandykes. Austria, in fact, has 
been growing rich while every other nation on the Conti- 
nent has been growing poor, and she has purchased the 
treasures of half the world at a discount.* 

It is wearisome writing of pictures, one's language is so 
limited. I must mention one or two in this collection, 
however, and I will let you off entirely on the Esterhazy, 
which is nearly as fine. 

Cleopatra dying. She is represented younger than usual, 
and with a more fragile and less queenly style of beauty 
than is common. It is a fair slight creature of seventeen, 
who looks made to depend for her very breath upon affec- 
tion, and is dying of a broken heart. It is painted with 
great feeling, and with a soft and delightful tone of colour 
which is peculiar to the artist. It is the third of Guido 
Cagnacci's pictures that I have seen. One was the gem of 
a gallery at Bologna, and was bought last summer by Mr. 
Cabot of Boston. 

The wife of Potiphar is usually represented as a woman 
of middle age, with a full voluptuous person. She is so 
Jrawn, I remember, in the famous picture in the Barberini 
palace at Rome, said to be the most expressive thing of its 
kind in the world. Here is a painting less dangerously- 
expressive of passion, but full of beauty. She is eighteen 
at the most, fair, delicate, and struggles with the slender 
boy, who seems scarce older than herself, — more like a sister 
from whom a mischievous brother has stolen something in 



* Besides the three galleries of the Belvedere, Leichstenstein, and Esterhazy, 
which contain as many choice masters as Rome and Florence together, the guide- 
book refers the traveller to sixty-four private galleries of oil-paintings, well worfck 
his attention, and to twenty-five private collections of engravings and antiquities. 
We shall soon be obliged to go to Vienna to study the arts, at this rate. They 
have only no sculpture. 

X 



162 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

sport. Her partly disclosed figure has all the incomplete 
slightness of a girl. The handsome features of Joseph 
express more embarrassment than anger. The habitual 
courtesy to his lovely mistress is still there ; his glance is 
just averted from the snowy bosom toward which he is 
drawn ; but in the firmly curved lip the sense of duty sits 
clearly defined, and evidently will triumph. I have for- 
gotten the painter's name. His model must have been 
some innocent girl whose modest beauty led him away from 
his subject. Called by another name, the picture were 
perfect. 

A portrait of Count Wallenstein, by Vandyke. It looks 
a man, in the fullest sense of the word. The pendant to it 
is the Countess Tourentaxis, and she is a woman he might 
well have loved — calm, lofty, and pure. They are pic- 
tures I should think would have an influence on the charac- 
ter of those who saw them habitually. 

Here is a curious picture by Schnoer — Mephistopheles 
tempting Faust. The scholar sits at his table, with a 
black-letter volume open before him, and apparatus of all 
descriptions around. The devil has entered in the midst of 
his speculations, dressed in black, like a professor, and 
stands waiting the decision of Faust, who gazes intently 
on the manuscript held in his hand. His fingers are 
clenched, his eyes start from his head, his feet are braced, 
and the devil eyes him with a side-glance, in which malig- 
nity and satisfaction are admirably mingled. The features 
of Faust are emaciated, and show the agitation of his soul 
very powerfully. The points of his compasses, globes, and 
instruments, emit electric sparks towards the infernal 
visitor ; his lamp burns blue, and the picture altogether 
has the most diabolical effect. It is a large painting ; and 
just below, by the same artist, hangs a small, simple, sweet 
Madonna. It is a singular contrast in subjects by the 
same hand. 

A portrait of the Princess Esterhazy, by Angelica Kauff- 
man — a beautiful woman, painted in the pure, touching 
style of that interesting artist. 

Then comes a " Cleopatra, dropping the pearl into the 
cup/' How often and how variously, and how admirably 
always, the Egyptian queen is painted : I never have seen 



LAMPl's VENUS. l6S 

an indifferent one. In this picture the painter seems to 
have lavished all he could conceive of female beauty upon 
his subject. She is a glorious creature. It reminds me of 
her own proud description of herself, when she is reproach- 
ing Antony to one of her maids, in " The False One " of 
Beaumont and Fletcher : 

" to prefer 
The lustre of a little trash, Arsinoe, 
Before the life of love and soul of beauty ! " 

1 have marked a great many pictures in this collection I 
cannot describe without wearying you, yet I feel unwilling 
to let them go by. A female, representing Religion feed- 
ing a dove from a cup, a most lovely thing by Guido ; por- 
traits of Gerard Douw and Rembrandt, by themselves 5 
Rubens' children, a boy and girl ten or twelve years of age, 
one of the most finished paintings I ever saw, and entirely 
free from the common dropsical stj;e of colouring of this 
artist ; another portrait of Giorgione's wife, the fiftieth that 
I have seen, at least, yet a face of which one would never 
become weary ; a glowing landscape by Fischer, the first 
by this celebrated artist 1 have met ; and last, (for this is 
mere catalogue-making,) a large picture representing the 
sitting of the English Parliament in the time of Pitt. It 
contains about a hundred portraits, among which those of 
Pitt and Fox are admirable. The great prime-minister 
stands speaking in the foreground, and Fox sits on the op- 
posite side of the House, listening attentively with half a 
smile on his features. It is a curious picture to find in 
Vienna. 

One thing more, however — a Venus, by Lampi. It kept 
me a great while before it. She lies asleep on a rich couch, 
and, apparently, in her dream, is pressing a rose to her 
bosom, while one delicate foot, carelessly thrown back, is 
half imbedded in a superb cushion supporting a crown and 
sceptre. It is a lie, by all experience. The moral is false, 
but the picture is delicious. 



M 2 



164 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 



LETTER IV. 

DEPARTURE FROM VIENNA THE EIL-WAGON— MOTLEY QUALITY 

OF THE PASSENGERS — THUNDERSTORM IN THE MOUNTAINS OF 

STYRIA TRIESTE SHORT BEDS OF THE GERMANS — GROTTO OP 

ADELSBURG ; CURIOUS BALL-ROOM IN THE CAVERN — NAUTICAL 
PREPARATIONS FOR A DANCE ON BOARD THE ie UNITED STATES '* 
SWEPT AWAY BY THE BORA — ITS SUCCESSFUL TERMINATION. 

July, 1833. 

I left Vienna at daylight in a Diligence nearly as capacious 
as a steam-boat — inaptly called the Eil-?vagon, A Friuli 
count with a pair of cavalry mustachios ; his wife, a pretty 
Viennese of eighteen, scarce married a year ; two fashion- 
able-looking young Russians ; an Austrian midshipman ; a 
fat Gratz lawyer ; a trader from the Danube ; and a young 
Bavarian student, going to seek his fortune in Egypt, were 
my companions. The social habits of Continental travellers 
had given me thus much information by the end of the 
first post. 

We drove on with German regularity, three days and 
three nights, eating four meals a-day, (and very good ones) 
and improving hourly in our acquaintance. The Russians 
spoke all our languages. The Friulese and the Bavarian 
spoke every thing but English ; and the lady, the trader, 
and the Gratz avocat, were confined to their vernacular. It 
was a pretty idea of Babel when the conversation became 
general. 

We were coursing the bank of a river, in one of the ro- 
mantic passes of the mountains of Styria, with a dark 
thunderstorm gathering on the summit of a crag overhang- 
ing us. I was pointing out to one of my companions a 
noble ruin of a castle seated very loftily on the edge of one 
of the precipices, when a streak of the most vivid lightning 
shot straight upon the northernmost turret, and the moment 
after several large masses rolled slowly down the mountain- 
side. It was so like the scenery in a play, that I looked at 
my companion with half a doubt that it was some optical 
delusion. It reminded me of some of Martin's engravings. 
The sublime is so well imitated in our day, that one is less 



THE GROTTO OF ABELSBURG. l65 

surprised than lie would suppose when nature produces the 
reality. 

The night was very beautiful when we reached the sum- 
mit of the mountain above Trieste. The new moon silvered 
the little curved bay below like a polished shield, and right 
in the path of its beams lay the two frigates like a painting. 
I must confess that the comfortable cot swinging in the 
ward-room of the " United States" was the prominent 
thought in my mind as I gazed upon the scene. The 
fatigue of three days' and nights' hard driving had dimmed 
my eye for the picturesque. Leaving my companions to 
the short beds* and narrow coverlets of a German hotel, I 
jumped into the first boat at the pier, and in a few minutes 
was alongside the ship. How musical is the hail of a 
sentry in one's native tongue, after a short habituation 
to the jargon of foreign languages ! " Boat ahoy !" It made 
my heart leap. The officers had just returned from Venice, 
some over land from the Friuli, and some by the steamer 
through the gulf, and were sitting round the table, laugh- 
ing with professional merriment over their various adven- 
tures. It was getting back to country, and friends, and 

liome. 

****** 

I accompanied the commodore's family yesterday in a 
visit to the Grotto of Adelsburg. It is about thirty miles 
back into the Friuli mountains, near the province of Ca- 
riola. We arrived at the nearest tavern at three in the 
afternoon, and, subscribing our names upon the magistrate's 
books, took four guides and the requisite number of torches, 
and started on foot. A half hour's walk brought us to a 
large, rushing stream, which, after turning a mill, disap- 
peared with violence into the mouth of a broad cavern, 
sunk in the base of a mountain. An iron gate opened on 
*he nearest side, and, lighting our torches, we received an 
addition of half a dozen men to our party of guides, and 
entered. We descended for ten or fifteen minutes, through 
a capacious gallery of rock, up to the ankles in mud, and 

* A German bed is never over five feet in length, and proportionately narrow. 
The sheets, blankets, and coverlets are cut exactly to the size of the bed's surface* 
so that there is no tucking up. The bed-clothes seem made for cradles. It is 
•easy to imagine how a tall person sleeps in them. 



166 PENCILLIIS'GS BY THE WAY. 

feeling continually the drippings exuding from the roof 
till, by the echoing murmurs of dashing water, we found 
ourselves approaching the bed of a subterraneous river. 
We soon emerged in a vast cavern, whose height, though 
we had twenty torches, was lost in the darkness. The 
river rushed dimly below us, at the depth of perhaps fifty 
feet, partially illuminated by a row of lamps hung on a 
slight wooden bridge, by which we were to cross to the 
opposite side. 

•We descended by a long flight of artificial stairs, and 
stood upon the bridge. The wildness of the scene is inde- 
scribable. A lamp or two glimmered faintly from the lofty 
parapet from which we had descended ; the depth and 
breadth of the surrounding cave could only be measured by 
the distance of the echoes of the waters ; and beneath us 
leaped and foamed a dark river, which sprang from its in- 
visible channel, danced a moment in the faint light of our 
lamps, and was lost again instantly in darkness. It brought 
with it from the green fields through which it had come, a 
current of soft warm air, peculiarly delightful after the 
chilliness of the other parts of the cavern ; there was a smell 
of new-mown hay in it which seemed lost upon the Tar- 
tarean blackness around. 

Our guides led on, and we mounted a long staircase on 
the opposite side of the bridge. At the head of it stood a 
kind of monument, engraved with the name of the emperor 
of Austria, by whose munificence the staircases had been 
cut and the conveniences for strangers provided. We turned 
hence to the right, and entered a long succession of natural 
corridors, roofed with stalactites, with a floor of rock and 
mud, and so even and wide that the lady under my protec- 
tion had seldom occasion to leave my arm. In the narrowest 
part of it, the stalactites formed a sort of reversed grove, 
with the roots in the roof. They were of a snowy white, 
and sparkled brilliantly in the light of the torches. One or 
two had reached the floor, and formed slender and beautiful 
sparry columns, upon which the names of hundreds of visitors 
were written in pencil. 

The spars grew white as we proceeded, and we were 
constantly emerging into large halls of the size of handsome 
drawing-rooms, whose glittering rocfs, and sides lined with 



ADtLSBURGH. l67 

fantastic columns, seemed like the brilliant frost-wort of a 
crystallised cavern of ice. Some of the accidental formations 
of the stalagmites were very curious. One large area was 
filled with them, of the height of small plants. It was 
called by the guides the " English Garden/' At the head 
of another saloon stood a throne, with a stalactite canopy 
above it, so like the work of art that it seemed as if the 
sculptor had but left the finishing undone. 

We returned part of the way we had come, and took 
another branch of the grotto, a little more on the descent. 
A sign above informed us that it was the " road to the in- 
fernal regions." We walked on an hour at a quick pace, 
stopping here and there to observe the oddity of the form- 
ations. In one place, the stalactites had enclosed a room, 
leaving only small openings between the columns, precisely 
like the grating of a prison. In another, the ceiling lifted 
out of the reach of torch light, and far above us we heard 
the deep-toned beat as upon a muffled bell. It was a thin 
circular sheet of spar, called ie the bell," to which one of 
the guides had mounted, striking upon it with a billet of 
wood. 

We came after a while to a deeper descent, which opened 
into a magnificent and spacious hall. It is called the "ball- 
room," and used as such once a year, on the occasion of a 
certain Illyrian festa. The floor has been cleared of stalag- 
mites: the roof and sides are ornamented bevond all art 
with glittering spars ; a natural gallery with a balustrade 
of stalactites contains the orchestra ; and side-rooms are all 
around where supper might be laid, and dressing-rooms 
offered in the style of a palace. I can imagine nothing 
more magnificent than such a scene. A literal description 
j f it even would read like a fairy tale. 

A little farther on, we came to a perfect representation 
of a waterfall. The impregnated water had fallen on a de- 
clivity, and, with a slightly ferruginous tinge of yellow, 
poured over in the most natural resemblance to a cascade 
after a rain. We proceeded for ten or fifteen minutes, and 
found a small room like a chapel, with a pulpit, in which 
stood one of the guides, who gave us, as we stood beneath, 
an Illyrian exhortation. There was a sounding-board 
above, and I have seen pulpits in old Gothic churches that 



16S PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

seemed at a first glance to have less method in their archi- 
tecture. The last tiling we reached was the most beautiful. 
From the cornice of a long gallery hung a thin, translucent 
sheet of spar, in the graceful and waving folds of a curtain ; 
with a lamp behind, the hand could be seen through any 
part of it. It was perhaps twenty feet in length, and hung 
five or six feet down from the roof of the cavern. ' The 
most singular part of it was the fringe. A ferruginous 
stain ran through it from one end to the other, with the 
exactness of a drawn line, and thence to the curving edge a 
most delicate rose-tint faded gradually down like the last 
flush of a sunset through a silken curtain. Had it been a 
work of art, done in alabaster, and stained with the 
pencil, it would have been thought admirable. 

The guide wished us to proceed, but our feet were wet, 
and the air of the cavern was too chill. We were at least 
four miles, they told us, from the entrance, having walked 
briskly for upwards of two hours. The grotto is said to 
extend ten miles under the mountains, and has never been 
thoroughly explored. Parties have started with provisions, 
and passed forty- eight hours in it, without finding the ex- 
tremity. It seems to me that any city I ever saw might be 
concealed in its caverns. I have often tried to conceive of 
the grottos of Anti-Paros, and the celebrated caverns of our 
own country, but I received here an entirely new idea 
of the possibility of space under ground. There is no con- 
ceiving it unseen. The river emerges on the other 
side of the mountain, seven or eight miles from its first 
entrance. 

We supped and slept at the little albergo of the village, 

and returned the next day to an early dinner. 

***** * 

A ball on board the <e United States." The guns were 
run out of the ports ; the main and mizen-masts were 
wound with red and white bunting ; the capstan was railed 
with arms and wreathed with flowers ; the wheel was tiec 7 
with nosegays ; the American eagle stood against the main- 
mast with a star of midshipmen's swords glittering above it ; 
festoons of evergreens were laced through the rigging ; the 
companion-way was arched with hoops of green leaves and 
roses ; the decks were tastefully chalked ; the commodore's 



THE FRIGATE'S BALL. l69 

skylight was piled with cushions and covered with red 
damask for an ottoman ; seats were laid along from one 
carronade to the another; and the whole was enclosed with 
a temporary tent lined throughout with showy flags, 
and studded all over with bouquets of all the flowers of 
Illyria. Chandeliers made of bayonets, battle-lanterns, and 
candles in any quantity, were disposed all over the hall. A 
splendid supper was set out on the gun-deck below, draped 
in with flags. Our own and the "Constellation's" boats 
were to be at the pier at nine o'clock to bring off the ladies ; 
and at noon everything promised of the brightest. 

First, about four in the afternoon came up a saucy-looking 
cloud from the westernmost peak of the Friuli. Then 
followed from every point towards the north an extending 
edge of a broad, solid black sheet, which rose with the regu- 
larity of a curtain, and began to send down a wind upon us 
which made us look anxiously to our ball-room bowlines. 
The midshipmen were all forward, watching it from the 
forecastle. The lieutenants were in the gang-way, watching 
it from the ladder. The commodore looked seriously out of 
the larboard cabin port. * It was as grave a ship's company 
as ever looked out for a shipwreck. 

The country about Trieste is shaped like a bellows, and 
the city and harbour lie in the nose. They have a wind 
that comes down through the valley, called the "bora/* 
which several times in a year is strong enough to lift 
people from their feet. We could see by the clouds of dust 
•on the mountain roads that it was coming. At six o'clock 
the shrouds began to creak ; the white tops flew from the 
waves in showers of spray, and the roof of our sea-palace 
began to shiver in the wind. There was no more hope. 
We had waited even too long. All hands were called to 
^ake down chandeliers, sword-stars, and ottomans ; and 
hefore it was half done, the storm was upon us, the bunting 
w 7 as flying and flapping, the nicely-chalked decks were 
swashed with rain, and strown with leaves of flowers, and 
the whole structure, the taste and labour of the ship's com- 
pany for two days, was a watery wreck. 

Lieutenant C , who had had the direction of the 

whole, was the officer of the deck. He sent for his pea- 
jacket, and, leaving him to pace out his watch among the 



170 PEflCILXJNGS BY THE WAY. 

ruins of his imagination, we went below to get early to bed,, 
and forget our disappointment in sleep. 

The next morning the sun rose without a veil. The 
V blue Friuli " looked clear and fresh ; the south-west wind 
came over softly from the shore of Italy, and we commenced 
retrieving our disaster with elastic spirit. Nothing had 
suffered seriously except the flowers, and boats were de- 
spatched ashore for fresh supplies, while the awnings were 
lifted higher and wider than before, the bright-coloured 
flags replaced, the arms polished and arranged in improved 
order, and the decks re- chalked with new devices. At six 
in the evening every thing was swept up, and the ball-room 
astonished even ourselves. It was the prettiest place for a 
dance in the world. 

The ship has an admirable band of twenty Italians, col- 
lected from Naples and other ports, and a fanciful orchestra 
was raised for them on the larboard side of the mainmast. 
They struck up a march as the first boatful of ladies stepped 
upon the deck, and in the course of half an hour the 
waltzing commenced with at least two hundred couples, 
while the ottoman and seats under the hammock-cloths were 
filled with spectators. The frigate has a lofty poop, and 
there was room enough upon it for two quadrilles after it 
had served as a reception-room. It was edged with a tem- 
porary balustrade, wreathed with flowers, and studded with 
lights ; and the cabin beneath (on a level with the main 
ball-room) was set out with card- tables. From the gang- 
way entrance, the scene was like a brilliant theatrical 
ballet. 

An amusing part of it was the sailor's imitation on the 
forward decks. They had taken the waste shrubbery and 
evergreens, of which there was a great quantity, and had 
formed a sort of grove, extending all around. It was arched 
with festoons of leaves, with quantities of fruit tied among 
them ; and over the entrance was suspended a rough picture 
of a frigate with the inscription " Free trade and sailors* 
rights/' The forecastle was ornamented with cutlasses and 
one or two nautical transparencies, with pistols and miniature 
ships interspersed, and the whole lit up handsomely. The 
men were dressed in their white-duck trowsers and blue 
jackets, and sat round on the guns playing at draughts, or 



THE FKIGATE*S BALL. 



listening to the music, or gazing at the ladies constantly 
promenading fore and aft, — and to me this was one of the 
most interesting parts of the spectacle. Five hundred 
weather beaten and manly faces are a fine sight any where. 

The dance went gaily on. The reigning belle was an 
American, but we had lovely women of all nations among 
our guests. There are several wealthy Jewish families in 
Trieste, and their dark-eyed daughters, we may say at this 
distance, are full of the thoughtful loveliness peculiar to the 
race. Then we had lllyrians and Germans, and, Terpsi- 
chore be our witness — how they danced! My travelling 
companion, the Count of Friuli, was there; and his little 
Viennese wife, though she spoke no Christian language, 
danced as featly as a fairy. Of strangers passing through 
Trieste we had several of distinction. Among them was a 
fascinating Milanese marchioness, a relative of Manzoni's 
the novelist, (and as enthusiastic and eloquent a lover of 
her country as I ever listened to on the subject of oppressed 
Italy ) and two handsome young men, the Counts Neipperg^ 
sons-in-law to Maria- Louisa, who amused themselves 
as if they had seen nothing better in the little duchy of 
Parma. 

We went below at midnight to supper, and the ladies 
came up with renewed spirit to the dance It was a 
brilliant scene indeed. The officers of both ships in full 
uniform ; the gentlemen from shore, mostly military, m 
full dress ; the gaiety of the bright-red bunting, laced with 
white and blue, and studded, wherever they would stana, 
.vith flowers ; and the really uncommon number of beautifu^ 
;vomen, with the foreign features and complexions so rich 
and captivating to our eyes, produced altogether an e&e-zt 
unsurpassed by any thing I have ever seen even at the ^ourc 
fetes of Europe. The daylight gun fired at the Cj.ose of a 
galopade, and the crowded boats pulled ashore w±tn twir 
lovely freight by the broad light of morning. 



172 PE^CILLTNGS BY THE WAY, 



LETTER V. 

TRIESTE, ITS EXTENSIVE COMMERCE — RUINS OF POLA — IMMENSE 

AMPHITHEATRE — VILLAGE OF POLA COAST OF DALMATIA, OF 

APULIA, AND CALABRIA OTRANTO THE ISLES OF GREECE. 

Aug. II, 1833. 

Trieste is certainly a most agreeable place. Its streets are 
beautifully paved and clean, its houses new and well-built, 
*and its shops as handsome and as well-stocked with every 
variety of thing as those of Paris. Its immense commerce 
brings all nations to its port, and it is quite the commercial 
centre of the Continent. The Turk smokes cross-legged in 
the cafe ; the English merchant has his box in the country, 
and his snug establishment in town; the Italian has his 
opera, and his wife her cavalier ; the Yankee captain his 
respectable boarding-house, and the German his four meals 
a-day at an hotel dyed brown with tobacco. Every nation 
is at home in Trieste. 

The society is beyond what is common in a European 
mercantile city. The English are numerous enough to 
support a church, and the circle, of which our hospitable 
consul is the centre, is one of the most refined and agreeable 
it has been my happiness to meet. The friends of Mr. 
Moore have pressed every possible civility and kindness 
upon the commodore and his officers, and his own house 
has been literally our home on shore. It is the curse of 
this volant life, otherwise so attractive, that its frequent 
partings are bitter in proportion to its good fortune. We 
make friends but to lose them. 

We got under weigh with a light breeze this morning, 
and stole gently out of the bay. The remembrance of a 
thousand kindnesses made our anchors lift heavily. We 
waved our handkerchiefs to the consul, whose balconies 
were filled with his charming family watching our depar- 
ture, and, with a freshening wind, disappeared around the 

point, and put up our helm for Pola. 

****** 

The ruins of Pola, though among the first in the world, 
are seldom visited. They lie on the eastern shore of the 



POL A. 17^ 

Adriatic, at the head of a superb natural bay, far from any 
populous town, and are seen only by the chance trader who 
hugs the shore for the land-breeze, or the Albanian robber 
who looks down upon them with wonder from the moun- 
tains. What their age is I cannot say nearly. The country 
was conquered by the Romans about one hundred years- 
before the time of our Saviour, and the amphitheatre and 
temples were probably erected soon after. 

We ran into the bay, with the other frigate close astern,, 
ind anchored off a small green island which shuts in the 
inner harbour. There is deep water up to the ancient town 
on either side, and it seems as if Nature had amused herself 
with constructing a harbour incapable of improvement. Pola 
lay about two miles from the sea. 

It was just evening, and we deferred our visit to the 
ruins till morning. The majestic amphitheatre stood on a. 
gentle ascent, a mile from the ship, goldenly bright in the 
flush of sunset ; the pleasant smell of the shore stole over 
the decks, and the bands of the two frigates played alter- 
nately the evening through. The receding mountains of 
Istria changed their light blue veils gradually to gray and 
sable ; and with the pure stars of these enchanted seas, and 
the shell of a new moon bending over Italy in the west, it 
was such a night as one remembers like a friend. The 
'Constellation' was to part from us here, leaving us to 
pursue our voyage to Greece. There were those on board 
who had brightened many of our " hours ashore," in these 
pleasant wanderings. We pulled back to our own ship, 
after a farewell visit, with regrets deepened by crowds of 
pleasant remembrances. 

The next morning we pulled ashore to the ruins. The 
amphitheatre was close upon the sea, and, to my surprise 
and pleasure, there was no cicerone. A contemplative 
donkey was grazing under the walls, but there was no 
other living creature near. W T e looked at its vast circular 
wall with astonishment. The Coliseum at Rome, a larger 
building of the same description, is, from the outside, much 
less imposing. The whole exterior wall, a circular pile one 
hundred feet high in front, and of immense blocks of marble 
and granite, is as perfect as when the Roman workman 
hewed the last stone. The interior has been nearly all 



174? PENCIIXttffrS BY THE WAY. 

removed. The well-hewn blocks of the many rows of seats 
were too tempting, like those of Rome, to the barbarians 
who were building near. The circle of the arena, in which 
the gladiators and wild beasts of these then new-conquered 
provinces fought, is still marked by the foundations of its 
barrier. It measures two hundred and twenty- three feet. 
Beneath it is a broad and deep canal, running toward the 
sea, filled with marble columns, still erect upon their pedes- 
tals, used probably for the introduction of water for the 
naumachia. The whole circumference of the amphitheatre 
is twelve hundred and fifty -six feet, and the thickness of 
the exterior wall seven feet six inches. Its shape is oblong, 
the length being four hundred and thirty-six feet, and the 
breadth three hundred and fifty. The measurements were 
taken by the captain's orders, and are doubtless critically 
correct. 

We loitered about the ruins several hours, finding in 
every direction the remains of the dilapidated interior. The 
sculpture upon the falling capitals and fragments of frieze 
was in the highest style of ornament. The arena is over- 
grown with rank grass, and the crevices in the walls are 
filled with flowers. A vineyard, with its large blue grapes 
just within a week of ripeness, encircles the rear of the 
amphitheatre. The boat's crew were soon among them, 
much better amused than they could have been by all the 
antiquities in Istria. 

We walked from the amphitheatre to the town ; a miser- 
able village built around two antique temples, one of which 
still stands alone, with its fine Corinthian columns, looking 
just ready to crumble. The other is incorporated barbar- 
ously with the guard-house of the place, and is a curious 
mixture of beautiful sculpture and dirty walls. The pedi- 
ment, which is still perfect, in the rear of the building, is a 
piece of carving worthy of the choicest cabinet of Europe. 
The thieveries from the amphitheatre are easily detected. 
There is scarce a beggar's house in the village, that does 
not show a bit or two of sculptured marble upon its front. 

At the end of the village stands a triumphal arch, re- 
cording the conquests of a Roman consul. Its front, towards 
the town, is of Parian marble, beautifully chiselled. One 
Recognises the solid magnificence of that glorious nation* 



POLA. 17^ 

when he looks on these relics of their distant conquests, 
almost perfect after eighteen hundred years. It seems as if 
the footprint of a Roman were eternal. 

We stood out of the little bay, and, with a fresh wind, 
ran down the coast of Dalmatia, and then, crossing to the 
Italian side, kept down the ancient shore of Apulia and 
Calabria to the mouth of the Adriatic. I have been looking 
at the land with the glass, as we ran smoothly along, count- 
ing castle after castle built boldly on the sea, and behind 
them, on the green hills, the thickly built villages, with 
their smoking chimneys and tall spires — pictures of fertility 
and peace. It was upon these shores that the Barbary 
corsairs descended so often during the last century, carrying 
off for Eastern harems the lovely women of Italy. We are 
just off Otranto, and a noble old castle stands frowning 
from the extremity of the Cape. We could throw a shot 
into its embrasures as we pass. It might be the " Castle of 
Otranto," for the romantic look it has from the sea. 

We have out-sailed the • Constellation/ or we should 
part from her here. Her destination is France ; and we 
shall be to-morrow amid the Isles of Greece.* The pleasure 
of realising the classic dreams of one's boyhood is not to be 
expressed in a line. I look forward to the succeeding 
month or two as to the " red-letter" chapter of my life. 
Whatever I may find the reality, my heart has glowed 
warmly and delightfully with the anticipation. Commodore 
Patterson is, fortunately for me, ,a scholar and a judicious 
lover of the arts, and loses no opportunity, consistently 
with his duty, to give his officers the means of examining 
the curious and the beautiful in these interesting seas. The 
cruise, thus far, has been one of continually mingled plea- 
sure and instruction : and the best of it, by every associa- 
tion of our early days, is to come. 

* It was to this point, (the ancient Hydrantum,) that Pyrrhus proposed to build 
ft fcridfe from Greece — only sixty miles ! He deserved to ride on an elephant. 



176 PENCILL1NGS BY THE WAY. 

LETTER VI. 
GREECE. 

THE IONIAN ISLES — LORD N CORFU GREEK AUD ENGLISH 

SOLDIERS — COCKNEYISM — THE GARDENS OF ALCINOUS ENGLISH 

OFFICERS — ALBANIANS — DIONISIO SALOMOS, THE GREEK POET 

GREEK LADIES DINNER WITH THE ARTILLERY-MESS. 

Aug. 20, 1835. 

•This is proper dream-land. The " Isle of Calypso"* folded 
in a drapery of blue air, lies behind, fading in the distance ; 
" the Acroceraunian mountains of old name," which caught 
Byron's eye as he entered Greece, are piled up before us on 
the Albanian shore ; and the Ionian sea is rippling under 
our bow, breathing, from every wave, of Homer, and 
Sappho, and "sad Penelope." Once more upon Childe 
Harold's footsteps. I closed the book at Rome, after fol- 
lowing him for a summer through Italy, confessing by many 
pleasant recollections, that 

" Not in vain 

He wore his sandal shoon and scallop shell." 

I resume it here, with the feeling of Thalaba when he 
caught sight of the green bird that led him through the 
desert. It lies open on my knee at the Second Canto, 
describing our position, even to the hour. 

" 'Twas on a Grecian autumn's gentle eve, 
Childe Harold hail'd Leucadia's cape afar ; 
A spot he long'd to see, nor cared to leave.** 

We shall lie off-and-on to-night, and go into Corfu in the 
morning. Two Turkish vessels of war, with the crescent 
\!ag flying, lie in a small cove a mile off, on the Albanian 
shore, and by the discharge of musketry our pilot presumes 
that they have accompanied the sultan's tax-gatherer, who 
gets nothing from these wild people without fighting for it. 
The entrance to Corfu is considered pretty, but the Eng- 
lish flag flying over the forts divested ancient Corcyra of its 
poetical associations. It looked to me a common-place sea- 

* Yano, which disputes it with Gk»o, noar Malta. 



CORFU. 177 

port glaring in the sun. The '* Gardens of Alcinous " were 
here, but who could imagine them, with a red-coated sentry 

nosted on every corner of the island ? 

* * * * # * 

The lord high commissioner of the Ionian Isles, Lord 

N , came off to the ship this morning in a kind of 

Corfiote boat, called a Scampavia — a greyhound-looking 
craft, carrying sail enough for a schooner. She cut the 
water like the wing of a swallow. His lordship was playing 
sailor, and was dressed like the mate of one of our coasters. 

Went on shore for a walk. Greeks and English soldiers 
mix oddly together. The streets are narrow, and crowded 
with them in about equal proportions. John Bull retains 
his red face, and learns no Greek. We passed through the 
Bazaar, and bad English was the universal language. 
There is but one square in the town, and round its wooden 
fence, enclosing a dusty area without a blade of grass, were 
riding the English officers, while the regimental band 
played in the centre. A more arid and cheerless spot never 
pained the eye. The appearance of the officers, retaining 
all their Bond Street elegance and mounted upon English 
hunters, was in singular contrast with the general shabbi- 
ness of the houses and people. I went into a shop at a 
corner to inquire for the residence of a gentleman to whom 
I had a letter. " It's werry 'ot, Sir," said a little red-faced 
woman behind the counter, as I went out, Ce perhaps you'd 
like a glass of vater." It was odd to hear the Wapping 
dialect in the " Isles of Greece." She sold green-groceries, 
and wished me to recommend her to the ^officers. Mrs* 
Mary Flack's " grocery " in the gardens of Alcinous ! 

" The wild Albanian, kirtled to the knee," walks through 
the streets of Corfu, looking unlike and superior to every 
thing about him. I met severa* in returning to the boat. 
Their gait is very lofty, and the snow-white jnctanilla, or 
kirtle, with its thousand folds, sways from side to side as 
they walk, with a most showy effect. Lord Byron was 
very much captivated with these people, whose capital (just 
across the Strait from Corfu) he visited once or twice in his 
travels through Greece. Those I have seen are all very 
tail, and have their prominent features, with keen eyes, and 



178 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

limbs of the most muscular proportions. The common 
English soldiers look like brutes beside them. 

The placard of a theatre hung on the walls of a church. 
A rude picture of a battle between the Greeks and Turks 
hung above it, and beneath was written in Italian, " Honour 
the representation of the immortal deeds of your hero, Marco 
Botzaris" It is singular that even a pack of slaves can 
find pleasure in a remembrance that reproaches every breath 
they draw. 

Called on Lord N with the commodore. The 

governor, sailor, author, antiquary, nobleman, (for he is all 
these, and a jockey, to boot,) received us in a calico morn- 
ing-frock, with his breast and neck bare, in a large library 
lumbered with half-packed antiquities, and strewn with 
straw. Books, miniatures of his family, Whig-pamphlets 
riding-whips, spurs, minerals, hammer and nails, half-eaten 
cakes, plans of fortifications, printed invitations to his own 
balls and dinners, military reports, Turkish pistols, and, 

lastly, his own just printed answer to Mr. S 's review 

of his book, occupied the table. His lordship mentioned, 
with great apparent satisfaction, a cruise he had taken some 
years ago with Commodore Chauncey. The conversation 
was rather monologue than dialogue ; his Excellency seem- 
ing to think, with Lord Bacon, that "the honourablest 
part of talk was to give the occasion, and then to moderate 
and pass to something else." He started a topic, exhausted 
and changed it with the same facility and rapidity with 
which he sailed his scampavia. An engagement with the 
artillery-mess prevented my acceptance of an invitation to 
dine with him to-morrow, — a circumstance I rather regret, 
as he is said to be, at his own table, one of the most polished 
and agreeable men of his time. 

Thank Heaven, revolutions do not affect the climate i 
The isle that gave a shelter to the storm-driven Ulysses is 
an English barrack, but the same balmy air that fanned the 
blind eves of old Homer, blows over it still. "The 
breezes," says Landor, beautifully, " are the children of 
eternity." I never had the hair lifted so pleasantly from my 
temples as to-night, driving into the interior of the island. 
The gardening of Alcinous seems to have been followed up 
by nature. The rhododendron, the tamarisk, the almond, 






CORFU. 17JJ 

cypress, olive, and fig, luxuriate in the sweetest beauty 
everywhere. 

There was a small party in the evening at the house of 
the gentleman who had driven me out, and among other 
foreigners present were the Count Dionisio Salomes, of 
Zante, and the Cavaliere Andrea Mustoxidi, both men of 
whom I had often heard. The first is almost the only 
modern Greek poet, and his iC Hymns," principally patriotic, 
are in the common dialect of the country, and said to be 
full of fire. He is an excessively handsome man, with a 
large dark eye, almost effeminate in its softness. His fea- 
tures are of the clearest Greek chiselling, as faultless as a 
statue, and are stamped with nature's most attractive marks 
of refinement and feeling. I can imagine Anacreon to have 
resembled him. 

Mustoxidi has been a conspicuous man in the late chap- 
ter of Grecian* history. He was much trusted by Capo 
d'Istria, and among other things had the whole charge of 
his school at JEgina. An Italian exile (a Modenese, and a 
very pleasant fellow,) took me aside when I asked some- 
thing of his history, and told me a story of him, which 
proves either that he was a dishonest man, or (no new 
truth) that conspicuous men are liable to be abused. A 
valuable donation of books was given by some one to the 
school library. They stood on the upper shelves, quite out 
of reach, and Mustoxidi was particular in forbidding all ap- 
proach to them. Some time after his departure from the 
island, the library was committed to the charge of another 
person, and the treasures of the upper shelves were found 
to be — painted boards ! His physiognomy would rather 
persuade me of the truth of the story. He is a small man, 
with a downcast look, and a sly, gray eye, almost hidden 
by his projecting eyebrows. His features are watched in 
vain for an open expression. 

The ladies of the party were principally Greeks. None 
of them were beautiful, but they had the melancholy, 
retired expression of face which one looks for, knowing the 
history of their nation. They are unwise enough to aban- 
don their picturesque national costume, and dress badly in 
the European style. The servant-girls with their hair 
braided into the folds of their turbans, and their open laced 

K 2 



180 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

"bodices and sleeves, are much more attractive to the stran- 
ger's eye. The liveliest of the party, a little Zantiote girl 
of eighteen, with eyes and eyelashes that contradicted the 
merry laugh on her lips, sang us an Albanian song to the 
guitar verv sweetly. 

Dined to-day with the artillery mess, in company with 
the commodore and some of his officers. In a place like 
this, the dinner naturally is the great circumstance of the 
day. The inhabitants do not take kindly to their masters, 
and there is next to no society for the English. They sit 
down to their soup after the evening drive, and seldom rise 
till midnight. It was a gay dinner, as dinners will always 
be where the whole remainder of what the " day may bring 
forth " is abandoned to them, and we parted from our hos- 
pitable entertainers, after four or five hours " measured with 
sands of gold." We must do the English the justice of 
confessing the manners of their best bred men to be the 
best in the world. One soon finds out in Europe that the 
dog and the lion are not more unlike, than the race of bag- 
men and runners with which our country is overrun, and 
the cultivated gentlemen of England. 

On my right sat a captain of the corps, who had spent 
the last summer at the Saratoga springs. We found any 
number of mutual acquaintances, of course, and I was 
amused with the impressions which some of the fairest of 
my friends had made upon a man who had passed years in 
the most cultivated society of Europe. He liked America, 
with reservations. He preferred our ladies to those of any 
other country except England, and he had found more dan- 
dies in one hour in Broadway than he should have met in 
a week in Regent Street. He gave me a racy scene or two 
from the City Hotel, in New York, but he doubted if the 
frequenters of a public table in any country in the world 
were, on the whole, so well-mannered. If Americans were 
peculiar for any thing, he thought it was for confidence in 
themselves and tobacco- chewing, 



CORFU. I8t 



LETTER VII. 

corfu — superstition of the greeks — advantage of the 

greek costume the paxian isles cape leucas, or 

sappho's leap — bay of navarino, ancient pylos — modon 

-— CORAN's BAY CAPE ST. ANGELO — ISLE OF CYTHERA. 

Corfu. — Called on one of the officers of the Tenth this 
morning, and found lying on his table two books upon 
Corfu. They were from the circulating library of the 
town, much thumbed, and contained the most unqualified 
strictures on the English administration in the islands. In 
one of them, by a Count or Colonel Boig de St. Vincent, a 
Frenchman, the Corfiotes were taunted with their slavish 
submission, and called upon to shake off the yoke of British 
dominion in the most inflammatory language. Such books 
in Italy or France would be burnt by the hangman, and 
prohibited on penalty of death. Here, with a haughty con- 
sciousness of superiority, which must be galling enough to 
an Ionian who is capable of feeling, they circulate uncen- 
sured in two languages ; and the officers of the abused 
government read them for their amusement, and return 
them coolly to go their rounds among the people. They 
have twenty-five hundred troops upon the island, and they 
trouble themselves little about what is thought of them. 
They confess that their government is excessively unpopu- 
lar : the officers mingle little in the native society, and the 

soldiers are scowled upon in the streets. 

***** 

The body of St. Spiridion was carried through the streets 
of Corfu to.day, sitting bolt upright in a sedan-chair, and 
accompanied by the whole population. He is the great 
saint of the Greek Church ; and such is his influence, that 
the English government thought proper, under Sir Frede- 
rick Adam's administration, to compel the officers to walk 
in the procession. The saint was dried at his death, and 
makes a neat, black mummy, sans eyes and nose, Dut other- 
wise quite perfect. He was carried by four men in a very 
splendid sedan, shaking from side to side with the motion, 



182 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

preceded by one of the bands of music from the English 
regiments. Sick children were thrown under the feet of 
the bearers ; half-dead people brought to the doors as he 
passed, and every species of disgusting mummery practised. 
The show lasted about four hours, and was, on the whole, 
attended with more marks of superstition than any thing I 
found in Italy. I was told that the better-educated Chris- 
tians of the Greek Church disbelieve the saint's miracles. 
The w 7 hole body of the Corfiote ecclesiastics were in the 

procession, however. 

****** 

I passed the first watch in the hammock-nettings to- 
night, enjoying inexpressibly the phenomena of this bril- 
liant climate. The stars seem burning like lamps in the 
absolute clearness of the atmosphere. Meteors shoot con- 
stantly with a slow liquid course over the sky. The air 
comes off from the land, laden with the breath of the wild 
thyme ; and the water around the ship is another deep blue 
heaven, motionless with its studded constellations. The 
frigate seems suspended between them. 

We have little idea, while conning an irksome school- 
task, how strongly the " unwilling lore " is rooting itself 
in the imagination. The frigate lies perhaps a half mile 
from the most interesting scenes of the Odyssey. I have 
been recalling from the long-neglected stores of memory 
the beautiful descriptions of the court of King Alcinous, 
and of the meeting of his matchless daughter with Ulysses. 
The whole web of the poet's fable has gradually unwound, 
and the lamps ashore, and the outline of the hills, in the 
deceiving dimness of night, have entered into the delusion 
with the facility of a dream. Every scene in Homer may 
be traced to this day, the blind old poet's topography was so 
admirable. It was over the point of land sloping down to 
the right that the Princess Nausicaa went with her hand- 
maids to wash her bridal robes in the running streams. The 
description still guides the traveller to the spot where the 
damsels of the royal maid spread the linen on the grass, 
and commenced the sports that waked Ulysses from his 

slumbers in the bed of leaves. 

****** 

Ashore with one of the officers this morning, amusing 



FAREWELL VISITS. 183 

ourselves with trying on dresses in a Greek tailor's shop. 
It quite puts one out of conceit with these miserable Euro- 
pean fashions. The easy and flowing juktanilla, the unem- 
barrassed leggins, the open sleeve of the collarless jacket 
leaving the throat exposed, and the handsome close-binding 
girdle seem to me the very dress dictated by reason and 
nature. The richest suit in the shop, a superb red velvet, 
wrought with gold, was priced at one hundred and forty 
dollars. The more sober colours were much cheaper. A 

dress lasts several years. 

****** 

We made our farewell visits to the officers of the English 
regiments, who had overwhelmed us with hospitality dur- 
ing our stay, and went on board to get under weigh with 
the noon-breeze. We were accompanied to the ship, not as 
the hero of Homer, when he left the same port, by three 
damsels of the royal train, bearing, " one a tunic, another a 
rich casket, and a third bread and wine " for his voyage ; 
but by Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Wilson, soldiers' wives 
and washerwomen, with baskets of hurriedly-dried linen, 
pinned, every bundle, with a neat bill in shillings and 

halfpence. 

****** 

Ulysses slept all the way from Corcyra to Ithaca. He 
lost a great deal of fine scenery. The passage between 
Corfu and Albania is beautiful. We ran past the southern 
cape of the island, with a free wind, and are now off the 
Paxian isles, where, according to Plutarch, iEmilianus the 
rhetorician, voyaging by night, i( heard a voice louder than 
human, announcing the death of Pan." A " schoolboy 
midshipman " is breaking the same silence with " On deck, 

all hands ! on deck, all of you ! " 

****** 

August 26, 1S33. 
Off the mouth of the Alpheus. If he still chases Are- 
thusa under the sea, and she makes straight for Sicily, her 
bed is beneath our keel. The moon is pouring her broad 
light over the ocean 5 the shadows of the rigging on the 
deck lie in clear and definite lines ; the sailors of the watch 
sit around upon the guns in silence : and the ship, with 
her clouds of snowy sail spread aloft, is stealing through 



184 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

the water with the noiseless motion of a swan. Even the 
gallant man-of-war seems steeped in the spirit of the scene. 
The hour wants but an " Ionian Myrrha " to fill the last 
void of the heart. 

Cape Leucas on the lee — the scene of Sappho's leap. We 
have coursed down the long shore of ancient Leucadia, and 
the precipice to which lovers came from all parts of Greece 
for an oblivious plunge is shining in the sun, scarce a mile 
from the ship. The beautifal Grecian here sang her last 
s6ng, and broke her lyre, and died. The leap was not al- 
ways so tragical ; there are two lovers, at least, on record, 
(Maces of Buthrotum, and Cephalos son of Deionios,) who 
survived the fall, and were cured effectually by salt water. 
It was a common resource in the days of Sappho, and Strabo 
says that they were accustomed to check their descent by 
tying birds and feathers to their arms. Females, he says, 
were generally killed by the rapidity of the fall, their 
frames being too slight to bear the shock ; but the men sel- 
dom failed to come safe to shore. The sex has not lost its 
advantages since the days of Phaon. 

We have caught a glimpse of Ithaca through the isles— 
the land 

" Where sad Penelope o'erlook'd the wave," 

and which Ulysses loved, non quia larga, sed quia sua— 
the most natural of reasons. We lose Childe Harold's track 
here. He turned to the left, into the Gulf of Lepanto. We 
shall find him again at Athens. Missolonghi, where he 
died, lies about twenty or thirty miles on our lee ; and it is 
one of several places in the Gulf, that I regret to pass so 

near unvisited. 

* * * * * * 

Entering the Bay of Navarino. A picturesque and pre- 
cipitous rock, filled with caves, nearly shuts the mouth of 
this ample harbour. We ran so close to it, that it might 
have been touched from the deck with a tandem whip. On 
a wild crag to the left, a small, white marble monument, 
with the earth still fresh about it, marks the grave ot 
some victim of the late naval battle. The town and for- 
tress, miserable heaps of dirty stone, lie in the curve of the 
southern shore. A French brig-of-war is at anchor in the 



NAVARINO 185 

port, and broad, barren hills, stretching far away on every 
side, complete the scene before us. We run up the har- 
bour, and tack to stand out again, without going ashore. 
Not a soul is to be seen ; and the bay seems the very sanc- 
tuary of silence. It is difficult to conceive, that but a year 
or two ago, the combined fleets of Europe were thundering 
among these silent hills, and hundreds of human beings 
lying in their blood, whose bones are now whitening in the 
sea beneath. Our pilot was in the fight, on board an 
English frigate. He has pointed out to us the position of 
the different fleets, and, among other particulars, he tells 
me, that when the Turkish ships were boarded, Greek 
sailors were found chained to the guns, who had been com- 
pelled, at the muzzle of the pistol, to fight against the cause 
of their country. Many of them must thus have perished 
in the vessels that were sunk. 

Navarino was the scene of a great deal of fighting during 
the late Greek revolutiop. It was invested, while in pos- 
session of the Turks, by two thousand Peloponnesians and 
a band of Ionians ; and the garrison were reduced to such a 
state of starvation, as to eat their slippers. They surrendered 
at last, under promise that their lives should be spared ; but 
the news of the massacre of the Greek patriarch and clergy, 
at Adrianople, was received at the moment, and the exasper- 
ated troops put their prisoners to death, without mercy. 

The peaceful aspect of the place is better suited to its 

poetical associations. Navarino was the ancient Pylos ; 

and it is here that Homer brings Telemachus in search of 

his father. He finds old Nestor and his sons sacrificing on 

the sea-shore to Neptune, with nine altars, and at each five 

hundred men. I should J;hink the modern town contained 

scarce a twentieth of this number. 

* * # * * * 

Rounding the little fortified town of Modon under full 
sail. It seems to be built on the level of the water, and 
nothing but its high wall and its towers are seen from the 
sea. This, too, has been a much-contested place, and re- 
mained in possession of the Turks till after the formation of 
the provisional government, under Mavrocordato. It forms 
the south-western point of the Morea, and is a town of 
great antiquity. King Philip gained his first battle over 



186 PEtfCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

the Athenians here, some thousands of years ago 5 and the 
brave old Miaulis beat the Egyptian fleet in the same bay, 
without doubt, in a manner quite as deserving of as long a 
remembrance. It is like a city of the dead — we cannot 

even see a sentinel on the wall. 

* * * * # * ' 

Passed an hour in the mizen-chains with " the Corsair '* 
in my hand, and Coran's Bay opening on the lee. With 
what exquisite pleasure one reads, when he can look off 
from the page, and study the scene of the poet's fiction : 

*' In Coran's Bay floats many a galley light, 
Through Coran's lattices the lamps burn bright, 
For Seyd, the Pacha, makes a feast to-night." 

It is a small, deep bay, with a fortified town, on the 
western shore, crowned on the very edge of the sea with a 
single tall tower. A small aperture near the top helps to 
realise the Corsair's imprisonment, and his beautiful inter- 
view with Gulnare : 

" In the high chamber of his highest tower 
Sate Conrad fetter'd in the Pacha's power," &e. 

The Pirate's Isle is said to have been Poros, and the 
original of the Corsair himself, a certain Hugh Crevelier, 

who filled the JEgean with terror, not many years ago. 

* ***** 

Made the Cape St. Angelo, the southern point of Pelo- 
ponnesus, and soon after the Island of Cythera, near which 
Venus rose from the foam of the sea. We are now running 
northerly, along the coast of ancient Sparta. It is a moun- 
tainous country, bare and rocky, and looks as rude and 
hardy as the character of its ancient sons. I have been 
passing the glass in vain, along the coast, to find a tree. A 
small hermitage stands on the desolate extremity of the 
Cape, and a Greek monk, the pilot tells me, has lived there 
many years, who comes from his cell, and stands on the 
rock, with his arms outspread, to bless the passing ship. I 
looked for him in vain. 

A French man-of-war bore down upon us a few minutes 
ago, and saluted the commodore. He ran so close, that we 



MEETING AT SEA. 187 

could see the features of his officers on the poop. It is a 
noble sight at sea, a fine ship passing, with all her canvass 
spread, with the added rapidity of your own course and 
hers. The peal of the guns in the midst of the solitary 
ocean had a singular effect. The echo came back from the 
naked shores of Sparta with a war-like sound, that might 
have stirred old Leonidas in his grave. The smoke rolled 
away on the wind, and the noble ship hoisted her royals 
once more, and went on her way. We are making for 
Napoli di Romania, with a summer breeze, and hope to 
drop anchor beneath its fortress at sunset. 



LETTER VIII. 

THE HARBOUR OF NAPOLI — TRICOUPI AND MAVROCORDATO, OTHO's- 

CABINET COUNCILLORS — KING OTHO PRINCE OF SAXE 

MIAULIS, THE GREEK ADMIRAL EXCURSION TO ARGOS, THE 

ANCIENT TIRYNTHUS. 

Sept. 1, 1835. 

Napoli di Romania. — Anchored in the harbour of 

Napoli after dark. An English frigate lies a little farther 

in ; a French and a Russian brig-of-war astern, and two 

Greek steam-boats, King Otho's yacht, and a quantity of 

caiques, fill the inner port. The fort stands a hundred feet 

over our heads on a bold promontory, and the rocky 

Palamidi soars a hundred feet still higher, on a crag that 

thrusts its head sharply into the clouds, as if it would lift 

the little fortress out of the eye-sight. The town lies at 

the base of the mountain, an irregular-looking heap of new 

houses; and here, at present, resides the boy-king of 

Greece, Otho the First. His predecessors were Agamemnon 

and Perseus, who, some three thousand years ago, (more or 

less, I am not certain of my chronology), reigned at Argos 

and Mycenae, within sight of his present capital. 

****** 

Went ashore with the commodore, to call on Tricoupi. 
and Mavrocordato, the king's cabinet councillors. We found 
the former in a new stone house, slenderly furnished, and 



188 PENCILLINGS 3Y THE WAY. 

fcadly painted, but with an entry full of servants, in hand- 
some Greek costumes. He received the commodore with 
the greatest friendliness. He had dined with him on board 
the ' Constitution " six years before, when his prospects 
were less promising than now. He is a short, stout man 
of dark complexion, and very bright black eyes, and speaks 
English perfectly. 

Went thence to Prince Mavrocordato's. He occupies th 
third story of a very indifferent house, furnished with th 
mere necessaries of life. A shabby sofa, a table, two chairs, 
and a broken tumbler, holding ink and two pens, is the in 
ventory of his drawing-room. He received us with elegance 
and courtesy, and presented us to his wife. She gave the 
uncertainty of their residence until the seat of government 
was decided on, as the apology for their lodgings, and seemed 
immediately to forget that she was not in a palace. 
Mavrocordato is a strikingly handsome man, with long, 
curling black hair, and most luxuriant mustachios. His 
mouth is bland, and his teeth uncommonly beautiful ; but, 
without being able to say where it lies, there is an ex- 
pression of guile in his face, that shut my heart to him. 
He is getting fat, and there is a shade of red in the clear 
olive of his sheek, which is very uncommon in this country. 
The commodore remarked that he was very thin when he 
was here six years before. The settlement of affairs in 

Greece has probably relieved him from a great deal of care. 

* * * * * 

Presented, with the commodore, to King Otho. Tricoupi 
officiated as chamberlain, dressed in a court-suit of light 
"blue, wrought with silver. The royal residence is a com- 
fortable house, built by Capo dTstria, in the principal street 
©f Napoli. The King's Aid, a son of Marco Bozzaris, a very 
fine, resolute-looking young man, of eighteen, received us 
in the ante-chamber, and in a few minutes the door of the 
inner room was thrown open. His Majesty stood at the foot 
of the throne, (a gorgeous red velvet arm-chair, raised on 
a platform, and covered with a splendid canopy of velvet), and 
with a low bow to each of us as we entered, he addressed 
his conversation immediately, and without embarrassment, 
to the commodore. I had leisure to observe him closely for 
a few minutes. He appears about eighteen. He wag 



3 



KING OTHO. 189* 

dressed in an exceedingly well-cut swallow-tailed coat, of 
very light blue, with a red standing collar, wrought with 
silver. The same work upon a red ground was set between 
the buttons of the waist, and upon the edges of the skirts. 
White pantaloons, and the ordinary straight court-sword, 
completed his dress. He is rather tall, and his figure i» 
extremely light and elegant. A very flat nose, and high 
cheek-bones, are the most marked features of his face 5 his 
hair his straight, and of a light brown, and with no claim 
to beauty ; the expression of his countenance is manly, open, 
and prepossessing. He spoke French fluently, though 
with a German accent, and went through the usual topics 
of a royal presentation (very much the same all over 
the world) with grace and ease. In the few remarks- 
which he addressed to me, he said that he promised himself 
great pleasure in the search for antiquities in Greece. He 
bowed us out, after an audience of about ten minutes, no 
doubt extremely happy to exchange his court-coat and 
our company for a riding-frock and saddle. His horse 
and a guard of twelve Lancers were in waiting at the 
door. 

The king usually passes his evenings with the Misses 
Armansberg, the daughters of the president of the regency* 
They accompanied him from Munich, and are the only 
ladies in his realm with whom he is acquainted. They 
keep a carriage, which is a kind of wonder at Napoli ; ride 
on horseback in the English style, very much to the amuse- 
ment of the Greeks ; and give soirees once or twice a week. 

The Count Armansberg is a small, shrewd-looking man, 
with a thin German countenance, and agreeable manners. 
He is, of course, the real king of Greece. 

The most agreeable man I found in Napoli was the king's 
uncle, at present in command of his army. He is a tall 
and uncommonly handsome soldier, of perhaps thirty-six 
years, and with all the air of a man of high birth, has the 
open and frank manners of the camp. He has been twice on 
board the ship, and seemed to consider his acquaintance 
with the commodore's family as a respite from exile. The 
Bavarian officers in his suite spoke nothing but the native 
I German, and looked like mere beef-eaters. The prince 
returns in two years, and when the King is of age, his 



190 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

Bavarian troops leave him, and he commits himself to the 
country. 

* ***** 

Hired the only two public vehicles in Napoli, and set off 
with the commodore's family, on an excursion to the ancient 
cities in the neighbourhood/ We left the gate built by the 
Venetians, and still adorned with a bas-relief of a winged 
lion, at nine o'clock of a clear Grecian summers day. 
Auguries were against us. Pyrrhus did the same thing 
with his elephants and his army, one morning, about two 
thousand years ago, and was killed before noon ; and our 
driver stopped his horses a half mile out of the gate, and 
told us very gravely that the evil eye was upon him. He 
had dreamed that he had found a dollar the night before — 
a certain sign, by the laws of witchcraft in Greece, that he 
should lose one. He concluded by adding another dollar to 
the price of each carriage. 

We passed the house of old Miaulis, the Greek admiral, 
a pretty cottage, a mile from the city, and immediately after 
came to the ruins of the ancient Tirynthus, the city of 
Hercules. The walls, built of the largest hewn stones in 
the world, still stand, and will till time ends. It would 
puzzle modern mechanics to carry them away. We drove 
along the same road upon which Autolycus taught the 
young hero to drive a chariot, and, passing ruins and 
fragments of columns strewn over the whole length of the 
plain of Argos, stopped under a spreading aspen-tree, the 
only shade within reach of the eye. A dirty khan stood a 
few yards off, and our horses were to remain here while we 
ascended the hills to Mycenae. 

It was a hot walk. The appearances of ladies, as we 
passed through a small Greek village on our way, drew out 
all the inhabitants, and we were accompanied by about fifty 
men, women, and children, resembling very much in com- 
plexion and dress the Indians of our country. A mile 
from our carriages we arrived at a subterranean structure, 
built in the side of the hill, with a door towards the east, 
surmounted by the hewn stone so famous for its size 
among the antiquities of Greece. It shuts the tomb 
«f old Agamemnon. The interior is a hollow cone, 
with a small chamber at the side, and would make 



MYCENAE. 191 

* 4 very eligible lodgings for a single gentleman/' as the 
papers say. 

We kept on up the hill, wondering that the " king of 
many islands and of all Argos," as Homer calls him, should 
have built his city so high in this hot climate. We sat 
down at last, quite fagged, at the gate of a city built only 
eighteen hundred years before Christ. A descendant of 
Perseus brought us some water in a wooden piggin, and 
somewhat refreshed, we went on with our examination of 
the ruins. The mere weight of the walls has kept them 
together three thousand six hundred years. You can judge 
how immovable they must be. The antiquaries call them 
the " Cyclopean walls of Mycenae ;" and nothing less than 
a giant, I should suppose, would dream of heaving such 
enormous masses one upon the other. " The gate of the 
Lions," probably the principal entrance to the city, is still 
perfect. The bas-relief from which it takes its name, is the 
oldest sculptured stone in Europe. It is of green basalt, 
representing two lions rampant, very finely executed, and 
was brought from Egypt. An angle of the city wall is 
just below, and the ruins of a noble aqueduct are still visible, 
following the curve of the opposite hill, and descending to 
Mycenae on the northern side. I might bore you now with 
a long chapter on antiquities, (for, however dry in the 
abstract, they are exceedingly interesting on the spot,) but 
I let you off. Those who like them will find Spohn and 
Wheeler, Dodvvell, Leake, and Gell, diffuse enough for the 
most classic enthusiasm. 

We descended by a rocky ravine, in the bosom of which 
lay a well with six large fig-trees growing at its brink. A 
woman burnt black with the sun, was drawing water in a 
goat-skin, and we were too happy to get into the shade, 
and, in the name of Pan, sink delicacy, and ask for a drink 
of water. I have seen the time when nectar in a cup of 
gold would have been less refreshing. 

We arrived at the aspen about two o'clock, and made 
preparations for our dinner. The sea-breeze had sprung 
up, and came freshly over the plain of Argos. We put our 
claret in a goat skin of water hung at one of the wheels, 
the basket was produced, the ladies sat in the interior of 
the carriage, and the commodore and his son and myself 



192 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

made tables of the footboards ; and thus we achieved a meal 
which, if meals are measured by content, old King Danaus 
and his fifty daughters might have risen from their grave 
to envy us. 

A very handsome Greek woman had brought us water 
and stood near while we were eating; and making' over to 
her the remnants of the ham and its condiments and the 
empty bottles, with which she seemed made happy for a 
day, we went on our way to Argos. 

ci Rivers die," it is said, " as well as men and cities. 
We drove through the bed of " Father Inachus," which 
was a respectable river in the time of Homer, but which, in 
our day, would be puzzled to drown a much less thing than 
a king. Men achieve immortality in a variety of ways. 
King Inachus might have been forgotten as the first Argive; 
but by drowning himself in the river which afterwards took 
his name, every knowledge-hunter that travels the world is 
compelled to look up his history. So St. Nippomuc be- 
came the guardian of bridges by breaking his neck over 
one. 

The modern Argos occupies the site of the ancient. It is 
tolerably populous, but it is a town of most wretched hovels. 
We drove through several long streets of mud houses with 
thatched roofs, completely open in front, and the whole 
family huddled together on the clay floor, with no furniture 
but a flock-bed in the corner. The first settlement hy 
Deucalion and Pyrrha on the sediment of the Deluge must 
have looked like it, Mud, stones, and beggars, were all we 
saw. Old Pyrrhus was killed here, after all his battles, by a 
tile from a house-top ; but modern Argos has scarce a roof 
high enough to overtop his helmet. 

We left our carriages in the street, and walked to the 
ruins of the amphitheatre. The brazen thalamos, in which 
Danae was confined when Jupiter visited her in a shower 
of gold, was near this spot, — the supposed site of most of 
the thirty temples once famous in Argos. 

Some solid brick walls, the seats of the amphitheatre cut 
into the solid rock of the hill, the rocky Acropolis above, 
and twenty or thirty horses tied together, and treading out 
grain on a threshing-floor in the open field, were all we 
found ancient or picturesque in the capitol of the Argives, 



AfcGOS. 1JJ3 

A hot, sultry afternoon was no time to weave romance from 
such materials. 

We returned to our carriages, and while the Greek was 
getting his horses into their harness, we entered a most 
unpromising cafe for shade and water. A billiard-table 
stood in the centre ; and the high broad bench on which 
the Turks seat themselves, with their legs crooked under 
them, stretched around the wall. The proprietor was a 
Venetian woman, who sighed, as she might well, for a 
gondola. The kingdom of Agamemnon was not to her 
taste. 

After waiting a while here for the sun to get behind the 
hills of Sparta, we received a message from our coachman, 
announcing that he was arrested. The i( evil eye * had not 
glanced upon him in vain. There was no returning with- 
out him, and I walked over with the commodore to see 
what could be done. A fine-looking man sat cross-legged 
on a bench, in the upper room of a building adjoining a 
prison, and a man, with a pen in his hand, was reading the 
indictment. The driver had struck a child who was climb- 
ing on his wheel. I pleaded his case in u choice Italian ;" 
and after a half-hour's delay, they dismissed him, exacting 
a dollar as a security for re-appearance. It was a curious 
verification of his morning's omen. 

We drove on over the plain, met the king, five camels, 
and the Misses Armansberg, and were on board soon after 
sunset. 



LETTER IX. 



VISIT FROM KING OTHO AND MlAULIS — VISITS AN ENGLISH AND 

RUSSIAN FRIGATE BEAUTY OF THE GRECIAN MEN LAKE 

LERNA — THE HERMIONICUS SINUS HYDRA — EGINA. 

Sbft. 1335. 

Napoli di Romania. — Went ashore with one of the officers 
to look for the fountain of Canathus. Its waters had the 
property (vide Pausanias) of renewing the infant purity of 
the women who bathed in them. Juno used it once a year. 

o 



IfM* PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

We found but one natural spring in all Napoli. It stands 
in a narrow street, filled with tailors, and is adorned with 
a marble font bearing a Turkish inscription. Two girls 
were drawing water in skins. We drank a little of it, but 
found nothing peculiar in the taste. Its virtues are con- 
fined probably to the other sex. 

* * * * * * 

The king visited the ship. As his barge left the pie* 
'the vessels of war in the harbour manned their yards and 
fired the royal salute. He was accompanied by young 
Bozzaris and the prince, his uncle, and dressed in the same 
uniform in which he received us at our presentation. As 
he stepped on the deck, and was received by Commodore 
Patterson, I thought I had never seen a more elegant and 
well-proportioned man. The frigate was in her usual ad- 
mirable order, and the king expressed his surprise and grati- 
fication at every turn. His questions were put with 
uncommon judgment for a landsman. We had heard, 
indeed, on board the English frigate which brought him 
from Trieste, that he lost no opportunity of learning the 
duties and management of the ship, keeping watch with 
the midshipmen, and running from one deck to the other at 
all hours. After going thoroughly through the ship, the 
Commodore presented him to his family. He seemed very 
much pleased with the ease and frankness with which he 
was received, and seating himself with our fair country- 
women in the after-cabin, prolonged his visit to a very 
unceremonious length, conversing with the most unreserved 
gaiety. The yards were manned again, the salutes fired 
once more, and the king of Greece tossed his oars for a 

moment under the stern, and pulled ashore. 

****** 

Had the pleasure and honour of showing Miaulis through 
the ship. The old man came on board very modestly with- 
out even announcing himself, and as he addressed one of 
.the officers in Italian, I was struck with his noble appear- 
ance, and offered my services as interpreter. He was dressed 
in the Hydriote costume, the full blue trowsers gathered at 
the knee, a short open jacket worked with black braid, and 
a red skull-cap. His lieutenant, dressed in the same cos- 
tume — a tall, superb-looking Greek — was his only attend- 



MIAULIS. lQb 

ant. He was quite at home on board, comparing the 
" United States " continually to the Hellas, the American- 
built frigate which he commanded. Every one on board 
was struck with the noble simplicity and dignity of his 
address. I have seldom seen a man who impressed me 
more. He requested me to express his pleasure at his visit, 
and his friendly feelings to the Commodore, and invited us 
to his country-house, which he pointed out from the deck, 
just without the city. Every officer in the ship uncovered 
as he passed. The gratification at seeing him was universal. 
He looks worthy to be one of the "three" that Byron 
demanded, in his impassioned verse, 

" To make a new Thermopylae. 



Returned visits of ceremony, with the Commodore, to the 
English and Russian vessels of war. 

Captain Lyon spoke in the highest terms of his late 
passenger, King Otho, both as to disposition and talent. 
Somewhere in the iEgean, one of his Bavarian servants 
fell overboard, and the boatswain jumped after him and 
sustained him till the boat was lowered to his relief. On 
his reaching the deck, the king drew a valuable repeater 
from his pocket, and presented it to him in the presence of 
the crew. He certainly has caught the rt trick of royalty " 
in its perfection. 

The guard presented, the boatswain " piped us over the 

side/' and we pulled alongside the Russian. The file of 

marines drawn up in honour of the Commodore on her 

quarter-deck looked like so many standing bears. Features 

and limbs so brutally coarse I never saw. The officers, 

however, were very gentlemanlike, and the vessel was in 

beautiful condition. In inquiring after the health of the 

ladies on board our ship, the captain and his lieutenant rose 

from their seats and made a low bow — a degree of chivalrous 

courtesy very uncommon, I fancy, since the days of Sir 

Piercie Shafton. I left his imperial majesty's ship with an 

improved impression of him. 

* * * * * * 

They are a gallant-looking people, the Greeks. Byron 
Gflys of them, " all are beautiful, very much resembling the 

o 2 



19t> PENCILLTNGS I3Y THE WAf. 

busts of Alcibiades." We walked beyond the walls of the 
city this evening, on the plain of Argos. The whole popu- 
lation were out in their Sunday costumes, and no theatrical 
ballet was ever more showy than the scene. They, are a 
very affectionate people, and walk usually hand in hand, or 
sit upon the rocks at the road-side, with their arms over 
each other's shoulders; and their picturesque attitudes and 
lofty gait, combined with the flowing beauty of their dress, 
give them all the appearance of heroes on the stage. I saw 
literally no handsome women, but the men were magnifi- 
cent, almost without exception. Among others, a young 
man passed us, with whose personal beauty the whole party 
were struck. As he went by, he laid his hand on his breast 
and bowed to the ladies, raising his red cap, with his flow- 
ing blue tassel, at the same time with perfect grace. It 
was a young man to whom I had been introduced the day 
previous, a brother of Mavromichalis, the assassin of Capo 
dTstrias. He is about seventeen, tall and straight as an 
arrow, and has the eye of a falcon. His family is one of 
the first in Greece ; and his brother, who was a fellow of 
superb beauty, is said to have died in the true heroic style, 
believing that he had rid his country of a tyrant. 

The view of Napoli and the Palamidi from the plain, 
with its background of the Spartan mountains, and the 
blue line of the Argolic Gulf between, is very fine. The 
home of the Nemean lion, the lofty hill rising above Argos, 
was enveloped in a black cloud as the sun set on our walk ; 
the short twilight of Greece thickened upon us ; and the 
white, swaying juktanillas of the Greeks striding past, had 
the effect of spirits gliding by in the dark. 

The king, with his guard of lancers on a hard trot, passed 
us near the gate, followed close by the Misses Armansberg, 
mounted on fine Hungarian horses. His majesty rides 
beautifully, and the effect of the short, high-borne flag on 
the tips of the lances, and the tall Polish caps with their 

cord and tassels, is highly picturesque. 

* # *'* -* # * 

Made an excursion with the Commodore across the Gulf 
to Lake Lerna, the home of the Hydra. We saw nothing 
save the half-dozen small marshy lakes, whose overflow 
devastated the country, until they were dammed by Her- 



HYDRA, 197 

cules, who is thus poetically said to have killed a many- 
lieaded monster. We visited, near-by, " the Mills," which 
■were the scene of one of the most famous battles of the late 
struggle. The mill is supplied by a lovely stream, issuing 
from beneath a rock, and running a short course of twenty 
or thirty rods to the sea. It is difficult to believe, that 
human blood has ever stained its pure waters. 

****** 

Left Napoli with the daylight breeze, and are now enter- 
ing the Hermionicus Sinus. A more barren land never rose 
upon the eye. The ancients considered this part of Greece 
so near to hell, that they omitted to put the usual obolon 
into the hands of those who died here, to pay their passage 
across the Styx. 

* * w * * ♦ 

Off the town of Hydra. This is the birthplace of Miaulis, 
and its neighbour island, Spesia, that of the sailor-heroine 
Bobolina. It is a heap of square stone houses, set on the 
side of a hill, without the slightest reference to order. I 
see with the glass an old Greek smoking on his balcony, 
with his feet over the railing, and half-a-dozen bare-legged 
"women getting a boat into the water on the beach. The 
whole island has a desolate and sterile aspect. Across the 
strait, directly opposite the town, lies a lovely green valley, 
with olive-groves and pastures between, and hundreds of 
grey cattle feeding, in all the peace of Arcadia. I have 
seen such pictures so seldom of late, that it is like a medicine 
to my sight. ic The sea and the sky," after a while, " lie 
like a load en the weary eye." 

****** 

In passing two small islands just now, we caught a 
glimpse between them of the tc John Adams " sloop of war, 
under full sail in the opposite direction. Five minutes 
sooner or later we should have missed her. She has been 
cruising in the Archipelago a month or two, waiting the 
commodore's arrival, and has on board despatches and let- 
ters, which make the meeting a very exciting one to the 
officers. There is a general stir of expectation on board, in 
which my only share Is that of sympathy. She brings her 
news from Smyrna, to which port, though my course has 



IJ)8 VENCILL1NGS BY THE WAY. 

Deen errant enough, you will scarce have thought of direct. 

ing a letter for me. 

****** 

Anchored off the island of Egina, a mile from the town. 
The rocks which King iEacus (since Judge iEacus of the 
infernal regions) raised in the harbour, to keep off the 
pirates, prevent our nearer approach. A beautiful garden 
of oranges and figs, close to our anchorage, promises to 
reconcile us to our position. The little bay is completely 
shut in by mountainous islands, and the sun pours down 
upon us, unabated by the " wooing Egean wind." 



LETTER X. 

THE MAID OF ATHENS ROMANCE AND REALITY — AMERICAN BENE- 
FACTIONS TO GREECE SCHOOL OF CAPO D'iSTRIAS GRECIAN 

DISINTERESTEDNESS — RUINS OF THE MOST ANCIENT TEMPLE 

BEAUTY OF THE GRECIAN LANDSCAPE — HOPE FOR THE LAND OF 
EPAMINONDAS AND ARISTIDES. 

Sept. 1833. 

Island of Egina. — The fi Maid of Athens/' in the very 
teeth of poetry, has become Mrs. Black of Egina ! The 
beautiful Teresa Makri — of whom Byron asked back his- 
heart, — of whom Moore and Hobhouse, and the poet him- 
self, have written so much and so passionately, — has for- 
gotten the sweet burden of the sweetest of love-songs, and 
taken the unromantic name of a Scotchman ! 

The Commodore proposed that we should call upon her 
on our way to the temple of Jupiter, this morning. We 
pulled up to the town in the barge, and landed on the 
handsome pier built by Dr. Howe, (who expended thus, 
most judiciously, a part of the provisions sent from our 
country in his charge) and, finding a Greek in the crowd, 
who understood a little Italian, we were soon on our way 
to Mrs. Black's. Our guide was a fine, grave-looking man 
of forty, with a small cockade on his red cap, which indi- 
cated that he was, some way, in the service of the govern- 
ment. He laid his hand on his heart, when I asked him 
if he had known any Americans in Egina. " They built 



EULHA 199 

this," said he, pointing to the pier, the handsome granite 
posts of which we were passing at the moment. " They 
gave us bread and meat, and clothing, when we should 
otherwise have perished." It was said with a look and 
tone that thrilled me. I felt as if the whole debt of sym- 
pathy, which Greece owes our country, were repaid by this 
one energetic expression of gratitude. 

We stopped opposite a small gate, and the Greek went in 
with our cards. It was a small stone house of a story and 
a half, with a rickety flight of wooden steps at the side, and 
not a blade of grass or sign of a flower in court or window. 
If there had been but a geranium in the porch, or a rose- 
tree by the gate, for description's sake ! 

Mr. Black was out— Mrs. Black was in. We walked up 
the creaking steps, with a Scotch terrier barking and 
snapping at our heels, and were met at the door by really a 
very pretty woman. ' She smiled as I apologized for our 
intrusion, and a sadder or a sweeter smile I never saw. 
She said her welcome in a few, simple words of Italian, and 
I thought there were few sweeter voices in the world. I 
asked her if she had not learned English yet. She coloured, 
and said li No, Sign ore !" and the deep-red spot in her 
cheek faded gradually down, in tints a painter would re- 
member. Her husband, she said, had wished to learn her 
language, and would never let her speak English. 

I wished to ask her of Lord Byron, but I had heard that 
the poet's admiration had occasioned the usual scandal 
attendant on every kind of pre-eminence, and her modest 
and timid manners, while they assured me of her purity of 
heart, made me afraid to venture where there was even a 
possibility of wounding her. She sat in a drooping attitude 
on the coarsely-covered divan, which occupied three sides of 
the little room, and it was difficult to believe that any eye 
but her husband's had ever looked upon her, or that the 
" wells of her heart " had ever been drawn upon for any 
thing deeper than the simple duties of a wife and mother. 

She offered us some sweetmeats, the usual Greek com- 
pliment to visitors, as we rose to go, and laying her hand 
upon her heart, in the beautiful custom of the country 
requested me to express her thanks to the Commodore for 
the honour he had done her in calling, and to wish him and 



200 PENCILLING S BY THE WAY. 

his family every happiness. A servant girl, very shabbily 
dressed, stood at the side-door, and we offered her some 
money, which she might bave taken unnoticed. She drew 
herself up very coldty, and refused it, as if she thought we 
had quite mistaken her. In a country where gifts of the 
kind are so universal, it spoke well for the pride* of the 
family, at least. 

I turned, after we had taken leave, and made an apology 
to speak to her again ; for, in the interest of the general 
impression she had made upon me, I had forgotten to notice 
her dress, and I was not sure that I could remember a 
single feature of her face. We had called unexpectedly, ot 
course, and her dress was very plain. A red cloth cap 
bound about the temples, with a coloured shawl, whose 
folds were mingled with large braids of dark-brown 
hair, and decked with a tassel of blue silk, which fell to 
her left shoulder, formed her head-dress. In other re- 
spects she was dressed like a European. She is a 
little above the middle height, slightly and well 
formed, and walks weakly, like most Greek women, as if 
her feet were too small for her weight. Her skin is dark 
and clear, and she has a colour in her cheek and lips that 
looks to me consumptive. Her teeth are white and regular 
her face oval, and her forehead and nose form the straight 
line of the Grecian model — one of the few instances I have 
ever seen of it. Her eyes are large and of a soft, liquid 
hazel ; and this is her chief beauty. There is that " looking 
out of the soul through them," which Byron always de- 
scribed as constituting the loveliness that most moved him. 
I made up my mind as we walked away, that she would be 
a lovely woman any where. Her horrid name, and the 
unprepossessing circumstances in which we found her, had 
uncharmed I thought, all poetical delusion that would na- 
turally surround her as the %e Maid of Athens." We met her 
as simple Mrs. Black, w T hose Scotch husband's terrier had 
worried us at her door ; and we left her, feeling that the 
poetry which she had called forth from the heart of Byron 
was her due by every law of loveliness. 

From the house of the Maid of Athens we walked to the 
school of Capo d'Istrias. It is a spacious stone quadrangle, 
inclosing a court handsomely railed and gravelled, and 






MAIDS OF ATHENS. 201 

furnished with gymnastic apparatus. School was out, and 
perhaps a hundred and fifty boys were playing in the area. 
An intelligent-looking man accompanied us through the 
museum of antiquities, where we saw r nothing very much 
worth noticing, after the collections of Rome, and to the 
library, where there was a superb bust of Capo d'Istrias, 
done by a Roman artist. It is a noble head, resembling 
Washington, 

We bought a large basket of grapes for a few cents in 
returning to the boat, and offered money to one or two 
common men who had been of assistance to us, but no one 
would receive it. I italicise the remark, because the Greeks 
are so often stigmatised as utterly mercenary. 

We pulled along the shore, passing round the point, on 
which stands a single fluted column, the only remains of a 
magnificent temple of Venus, and, getting the wind, 
hoisted a sail, and ran down the northern side of the island 
five or six miles, till we arrived opposite the mountain on 
which stands the temple of Jupiter Panhellenios. The 
view of it from the sea was like that of a temple drawn on 
the sky. It occupies the very peak of the mountain, and is 
seen many miles on either side by the mariner of the 
iEgean. 

A couple of wild-looking, handsome fellows, bare-headed 
and bare-legged, with shirts and trowsers reaching to the 
knee, lay in a small caique under the shore; and as we 
landed, the taller of the two laid his hand on his breast, 
and offered to conduct us to the temple. The ascent was 
about a mile. 

We toiled over ploughed fields, with here and there 
cluster of fig-trees, wild patches of rock and briar, and an 
occasional wall, and arrived breathless at the top, where a 
cool wind met us from the other side of the sea with de- 
licious refreshment. We sat down among the ruins of the 
oldest temple of Greece, after that of Corinth. Twenty- 
three noble columns still lifted their heads over us, after 
braving the tempests of more than two thousand years. 
The ground about was piled up with magnificent fragments 
of marble, preserving even in their fall, the sharp edges of 
the admirable sculpture of Greece. The Doric capital, the 
simple frieze, the well-fitted frustra, might almost be re* 



202 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY 

stored in the perfection with which they were left by the 
last touch of the chisel. 

The view hence comprised a classic world. There was 
Athens! The broad mountain over the intensely blue 
gulf at our feet was Hymettus, and a bright white summit 
as of a mound between it and the sea, glittering brightly 
in the sun, was the venerable pile of temples in the 
Acropolis. To the left, Corinth was distinguishable over 
its low Isthmus, and Megara and Salamis ; and, following 
down the wavy line of the mountains of Attica, the pro- 
montory of Sunium, modern Cape Colonna, dropped the 
horizon upon the sea. One might sit out his life amid 
these loftily-placed ruins, and scarce exhaust in thought the 
human history that has unrolled within the scope or 
liis eye. 

We passed two or three hours wandering about among 
the broken columns, and gazing away to the main and the 
distant isles, confessing the surpassing beauty of Greece. 
Yet have its mountains scarce a green spot, and its vales 
are treeless and uninhabited, and all that constitutes desola- 
tion is there ; and, strange as it may seem, you neither miss 
the verdure nor the people, nor find it desolate. The out- 
line of Greece, in the first place, is the finest in the world. 
The mountains lean down into the valleys, and the plains 
swell up to the mountains, and the islands rise from the sea, 
with a mixture of boldness and grace altogether peculiar. 
In the most lonely parts of the iEgean, where you can see 
no trace of a human foot, it strikes you like a foreign land. 
Then the atmosphere is its own ; and it exceeds that of 
Italy, far. It gives it the look of a landscape seen through 
a faintly-tinted glass. Soft blue mists of the most rarified 
and changing shades envelope the mountains on the clearest 
day, and, without obscuring the most distant points per- 
ceptibly, give hill and vale a beauty that surpasses that of 
verdure. I never saw such air as I see in Greece. It has 
the same effect on the herbless and rocky scenery about us, 
as a veil over the face of a woman. 

The islander who had accompanied us to the temple stood 
on a fragment of a column, still as a statue, looking down 
upon the sea towards Athens. His figure, for Athletic 
£race of mould, and his head and features, for the expres. 



THE AEGEAN. 20& 

sion of manly beauty and character, might have been 
models to Phidias. The beautiful and poetical land, of 
which he inherited his share of unparalleled glory, lay 
around him. 1 asked myself why it should have become,, 
as it seems to be, the despair of the philanthropist. Why 
should its people, who, in the opinion of ' Childe Harold,* 
are nature's favourites still," be branded and abandoned asv 
irreclaimable rogues, and the source to which we owe, even 
to this day, our highest models of taste, be neglected and 
forgotten ? The nine days' enthusiasm for Greece has died 
away, and she has received a king from a family of despots. 
But there seems to me in her very beauty, and in the still 
superior qualities of her children, wherever they have room 
for competition, a promise of resuscitation. The convulsions 
of Europe may leave her soon to herself; and the slipper 
of the Turk and the hand of the Christian, once lifted fairly 
from her neck, she will rise, and stand up amid these im- 
perishable temples, once more free ! 



LETTER XL 



ATHENS — RUINS OF THE PARTHENON — THE ACROPOLIS — TEMPLE 

OF THESEUS — BURIAL-PLACE OF THE SON OFMlAULIS BAVARIAN 

SENTINEL TURKISH MOSQUE, ERECTED WITHIN THE SANC- 
TUARY OF THE PARTHENON WRETCHED HABITATIONS OF 

THE MODERN ATHENIANS. 

Sept. 1833. 

Egean Sea. — We got under weigh this morning, and stood 
towards Athens, followed by the sloop-of-war John Adams, 
which had come to anchor under our stern the evening of 
our arrival at Egina. The day is like every day of the 
Grecian summer, heavenly. The stillness and beauty of a 
new world lie about us. The ships steal on with their 
clouds of canvass just filling in the light breeze of the 
iEgean, and, withdrawing the eye from the lofty temple- 
crowning the mountain on our lee, whose shining columns- 
shift slowly as we pass, we could believe ourselves asleep on 
the sea. I have been repeating to myself the beautiful re- 
flection of Servius Sulpitius, which occurs in his letter o£ 



204 PENC1LLINGS BY THE WAr. 

condolence to Cicero, on the death of his daughter, written 
on this very spot.* " On my return from Asia," he says, 
<c as I was sailing from Egina towards Megara, 1 began to 
contemplate the prospect of the countries around me. 
Egina was behind, Megara before me ; Piraeus on the right, 
Corinth on the left ; all which towns, once famous and 
ilourishing, now lie overturned and buried in the ruins 
upon this sight I could not but presently think within 
myself, c Alas ! how do we poor mortals fret and vex our- 
selves if any of our friends happen to die or be killed, whose 
life is yet so short, when the carcases of so many cities lie 
here exposed before me in one view !' " 

The columns of the Parthenon are easily distinguishable 
with the glass, and to the right of the Acropolis, in the 
plain, I see a group of tall ruins, which by the position 
must be near the banks of the Ilissus. I turn the glass 
upon the sides of the mount Hymettus, whose beds of 
thyme " the long, long summer gilds," and I can scarce 
Relieve that the murmur of the bees is not stealing over the 
water to my ear. Can this be Athens? Are these the 
same isles and mountains Alcibiades saw, returning with 
his victorious galleys from the Hellespont ; the same that 
faded from the long gaze of the conqueror of Salamis, 
leaving his ungrateful country for exile 5 the same that to 
have seen for a Roman, was to be as complete as a man ; 
the same whose proud dames wore the golden grasshopper in 
their hair, as a boasting token that they had sprung from 
the soil ; the same where Pericles nursed the Arts, and 
Socrates and Plato taught " humanity/' and Epicurus 
walked with his disciples, looking for truth ? What an 
offset are these thrilling thoughts, with the nearing view in 
my sight, to a whole calendar of common misfortune ! 

Dropped anchor in the Piraeus, the port of Athens. The 
city is five miles in the interior, and the " arms of Athens,'** 
as the extending walls were called, stretched in the times 
of the republic from the Acropolis to the sea. The Piraeus, 
now nearly a deserted port, with a few wretched houses, 
'was then a large city. It wants an hour to sunset, and 

* " Ex Asia rediens," &c. — I have given the translation from MiddletorrTi 
Ctcero. 



ATHENS. 205 

I am about starting with one of the officers to walk to< 
Athens 



•& 



Five miles more sacred in history than those between* 
the Pineus and the Acropolis, do not exist in the world- 
We walked them in about two hours, with a golden sunset, 
at our backs, and the excitement inseparable from an ap- 
proach to "the eye of Greece," giving elasticity to our 
steps. Near the Parthenon, which had been glowing in a 
flood of Saffron light before us, the road separated, and, 
taking the right, we entered the city by its southern gate. 
A tall Greek, who was returning from the plains with a 
gun on his shoulder, led us through the narrow streets of 
the modern town to a hotel, where a comfortable supper, of 
which the most attractive circumstance to me was some 

honey from Hymettus, brought us to bed-time. 

* ' * * * * * 

We were standing under the colonnades of the temple of 
Theseus, the oldest and the best preserved of the antiquities, 
of Athens, at an early hour. We walked around it in 
wonder. The sun that threw inward the shadows of its. 
beautiful columns, had risen on that eastern porch for more 
than two thousand years, and it is still the transcendent 
model of the world. The Parthenon was a copy of it. The 
now venerable and ruined temples of Rome were built in 
its proportions when it was already an antiquity. The 
modern edifices of every civilised nation are considered 
faulty only as they depart from it. How little dreamed 
the admirable Grecian, when its proportions rose gradually^ 
to his patient thought, that the child of his teeming imagina- 
tion would be so immortal ! 

The situation of the Theseion has done much to preserve- 
it. It stands free of the city, while the Parthenon and the 
other temples of the Acropolis, being within the citadel* 
have been battered by every assailant, from the Venetian 
to the iconoclast and the Turk. It looks at a little dis- 
tance like a modern structure, its parts are so nearly perfect. 
It is only on coming close to the columns that you see the 
stains in the marble to be the corrosion of the long feeding 
tooth of ages. A young Englishman is buried within the 
nave of the temple ; and the son of Miaulis, said to have 



S06 PENCILLING S BY THE WAY. 

been a young man worthy of the hest days of Greece, lies 
in the eastern porch, with the weeds growing rank over his 
grave. 

We passed a handsome portico, standing alone amid a 
heap of ruins. It was the entrance to the ancient 'Agora. 
Here assembled the people of Athens, the constituents and 
-supporters of Pericles, the first possessors of these god-like 
temples. Here were sown, in the ears of the Athenians, 
•the first seeds of glory and sedition, by patriots and dema- 
gogues, in the stirring days of Platgea and Marathon. Here 
was it first whispered that Aristides had been too long 
called " the Just," and that Socrates corrupted the youth of 
Athens. And, for a lighter thought, it was here that the 
wronged wife of Alcibiades, compelled to come forth pub- 
licly and sign her divorce, was snatched up in the arms of* 
her brilliant but dissolute husband, and carried forcibly 
liome, forgiving him, woman -like, with but half a repent- 
ance. The feeling with which I read the story when a 
boy is strangely fresh in my memory. 

We hurried on to the Acropolis. The ascent is winding 
and difficult, and, near the gates, encumbered with marble 
rubbish. Volumes have been written on the antiquities 
which exist still within the walls. The greater part of four 
unrivalled temples are still lifted to the sun by this tall 
rock in the centre of Athens, the majestic Parthenon, visible 
over half Greece, towering above all. A Bavarian soldier 
received our passport at the gate. He was resting the butt 
of his musket on a superb bas-relief, a fragment from the 
Tuins. How must the blood of a Greek boil to see a bar- 
barian thus set to guard the very sanctuary of his glory ! 

We stood under the portico of the Parthenon, and looked 
•down on Greece. Right through a broad gap in the moun- 
tains, as if they had been swept away that Athens might 
oe seen, stood the shining Acropolis of Corinth. I strained 
my eyes to see Diogenes lying under the walls, and Alex- 
bander standing in his sunshine. " Sea-born Salamis" was 
beneath me, but the (C ships by thousands " were not there, 
and the king had vanished from the " rocky brow " with 
liis "men and nations." Egina lay far down the gulf, 
folded in its blue mist, and I strained my sight to see 
^ristides wandering in exile on its shore. Mars' Hill was 



plato's academy. 207 

within the sound of my voice, but its Areopagus wac 
deserted of its judges, and the intrepid apostle was gone. 
The rostrum of Demosthenes, and the academy of Plato, 
and the banks of the Ilissus, where Socrates and Zeno 
taught, were all around me ; but the wily orator, and the 
philosopher, " on whose infant lips the bees shed honey as 
he slept," and he whose death and doctrine have been com- 
pared to those of Christ, and the self-denying stoic, were 
alike departed. Silence and ruin brood over all ! 

I walked through the nave of the Parthenon, passing a 
small Turkish mosque, (built sacrilegiously by the former 
Disdar of Athens, within its very sanctuary,) and mounted 
the south-eastern rampart of the Acropolis. Through the 
plain beneath ran the classic Ilissus, and on its banks 
stood the ruins of the temple of Jupiter Olympus, which I 
had distinguished with the glass in coming up the Egean. 
The Ilissus was nearly dry, but a small island covered with 
verdure divided its waters a short distance above the temple, 
and near it were distinguishable the foundations of the 
Lyceum. Aristotle and his Peripatetics ramble there no 
more. A herd of small Turkish horses were feeding up 
towards Hymettus, the only trace of life in a valley that 
was once alive with the brightest of the tides of human 
existence. 

The sun poured into the Acropolis with an intensity I 
have seldom felt. The morning breeze had died away, and 
the glare from the bright marble ruins was almost intoler- 
able to the eye. I climbed around over the heaps of frag- 
mented columns, and maimed and fallen statues, to the 
north-western corner of the citadel, and sat down in the 
shade of one of the embrasures to look over towards PIato T s 
Academy. The part of the city below this corner of the 
wall was the ancient Pelasgicum. It was from the spot 
where I sat, that Parrhesiades, the fisherman, is represented 
in Lucian to have angled for philosophers, with a hook 
baited with gold and figs. 

The Academy (to me the most interesting spot of Athens) 
is still shaded with olive-groves, as in the time of Plato. 
The Cephissus, whose gentle flow has mingled its murmur 
with so much sweet philosophy, was hidden from my sight 
by the numberless trees. 1 looked towards the spot witt 



208 PENCILLINGS BY THE WA^* 

inexpressible interest. I had not yet been near enough to 
dispel the illusion. To me the Academy was still beneath 
/hose silvery olives in all its poetic glory. The ct Altar of 
Love " still stood before the entrance ; the temple of Pro- 
metheus, the sanctuary of the Muses, the statues of Plato 
and of the Graces, the sacred olive, the tank in the coal 
gardens, and the tower of the railing Timon, were all there. 
I could almost have waited till evening to see Epicurus and 
Leontium, Socrates and Aspasia, returning to Athens. 

We passed the Tower of the Winds, the ancient clepsydra 
or water-clock of Athens, in returning to the hotel. The 
Eight Winds, sculptured on the octagonal sides, are dressed 
according to their temperatures, six of them being mflre or 
less draped, and the remaining two nude. It is a small 
marble building more curious than beautiful. 

Our way lay through the sultry streets of Modern Athens. 
I can give you an idea of it in a single sentence. It is a 
large village of originally mean houses, pulled down to the 
very cellars, and lying choked in its rubbish. A large square 
in ruins, after a fire in one of our cities, looks like it. It 
has been destroyed so often by Turks and Greeks alternately, 
that scarce one stone is left upon another. The inhabitants 
thatch over one corner of these wretched and dusty holes 
with maize-stalks and straw, and live there like beasts. 
The fineness of the climate makes a roof almost unnecessary 
for eight months in the year. The consuls and authorities 
of the place, and the missionaries, have tolerable houses, 
but the paths to them are next to impracticable for the 
rubbish. Nothing but a Turkish horse, which could be 
ridden up a precipice, would ever pick his way througri the 
streets. 



TEMPLE Of JUPITER OLYMPUS. 209 



LETTER XII. 

THE " LANTERN OF DEMOSTHENES " — BYRON'S RESIDENCE IN 

ATHENS TEMPLE OF JUPITER OLYMPUS — SUPERSTITIOUS FANCY 

OF THE ATHENIANS RESPECTING ITS RUINS HERMITAGE OF A 

GREEK MONK — PETARCHES, THE ANTIQUARY AND POET, AND HIS 

WIFE, SISTER TO THE "MAID OF ATHENS " MUTILATION OF A 

BASSO-RELIEVO BY AN ENGLISH OFFICER THE ELGIN MARBLES 

THE CARYATIDES LORD BYRON'S AUTOGRAPH — THE SLIDING 

STONE— A SCENE IN THE ROSTRUM OF DEMOSTHENES. 

Sept. 1835. 

Took a walk by sunset to the Ilissus. I passed, on the way, 
the " Lantern of Demosthenes," a small, octagonal building 
of marble, adorned with splendid columns and a beautifully- 
sculptured frieze, in which it is said the orator used to shut 
himself for a month, with his head half-shaved, to practise 
his orations. The Franciscan convent, Byron's residence 
while in Athens, was built adjoining it, it is now demolished. 
The poet's name is written with his own hand on a marble 
slab of the wall. 

I left the city by the gate of Hadrian, and walked on to 
the temple of Jupiter Olympus. It crowns a small eleva- 
tion on the northern bank of the Ilissus. It was once be- 
yond all comparison the largest and most costly building in 
the world. During seven hundred years it employed the 
attention of the rulers of Greece, from Pisistratus to 
Hadrian, and was never quite completed. As a ruin it is 
the most beautiful object I ever saw. Thirteen columns of 
Pentelic marble, partly connected by a frieze, are all that 
j remain. They are of the flowery Corinthian order, and 
sixty feet in height, exclusive of base or capital. 

Three perfect columns stand separate from the rest, and 
lift from the midst of that solitary plain with an effect that, 
to my mind, is one of the highest sublimity. The sky might 
rest on them. They seem made to sustain it. As I lay on 
the parched grass and gazed on them in the glory of a 
Grecian sunset, they seemed to me proportioned for a con- 
tinent. The mountains I saw between them were not de- 
signed with more amplitude, nor corresponded more nobly 
lo the sky above. 



.210 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

The people of Athens have a superstitious reverence for 
these ruins. Dodwell says, " The single column towards 
the western extremity was thrown down, many years ago, 
by a Turkish voivode, for the sake of the materials, which 
were employed in constructing the great mosque of the 
bazaar. The Athenians relate, that, after it was thrown 
down, the three others nearest to it were heard to lament 
the loss of their sister, and these nocturnal lamentations did 
not cease till the sacrilegious voivode was destroyed by 
poison." 

Two of the columns connected by one immense slab, are 
surmounted by a small building, now in ruins, but once the 
hermitage of a Greek monk. Here he passed his life, 
seventy feet in the air, sustained by two of the most graceful 
columns of Greece. A basket, lowered, by a line, was rilled 
by the pious every morning, but the romantic eremite was 
never seen. With the lofty Acropolis crowned with temples 
just beyond him, the murm'jrisg Ilissus below, the thyme- 
covered sides of Hymettus to the south, and the blue iEgean 
stretching away to the west, his eye, at least, could never 
tire. There are times when I could envy him his lift above 
the world. 

I descended to the Fountain of Callirhoe, which gushes 
from beneath a rock in the bed of the Ilissus, just below 
the temple. It is the scene of the death of the lovely 
nymph-mother of Ganymede. The twilight air was laden 
with the fragrant thyme, and the songs of the Greek 
labourers returning from the fields came faintly over the 
plains. Life seems too short when every breath is a pleasure. 
I loitered about the clear and rocky lip of the fountain till 
the pool below reflected the stars in its trembling bosom. 
The lamps began to twinkle in Athens, Hesperus rose over 
Mount Pentelicus like a blazing lamp, the sky over Salamis 
faded down to the sober tint of night, and the columns of 
the Parthenon mingled into a single mass of shade. And 
so, I thought, as I strolled back to the city, concludes a day 
in Athens — one, at least, in my life, for which it is worth 
the trouble to have lived. 

I was again in the Acropolis the following morning. 
Mr. Hill had kindly given me a note to Petarches, the 
king's antiquary, a young Athenian, who married the sister 



THE ERECHTHEION. 21 t 

of the maid of Athens.* We went together through the 
ruins. They have lately made new excavations, and some 
superb bassi-relievi are among the discoveries. One of 
them represented a procession leading victims to sacrifice, 
and was quite the finest thing 1 ever saw. The leading 
figure was a superb female, from the head of which the 
nose had lately been barbarously broken. The face of the 
enthusiastic antiquary flushed while I was lamenting it. 

For my own part, I cannot conceive the motive for carry- 
ing away a fragment of a statue or a column. I should as 
soon think of drawing a tooth as a specimen of some beauti- 
ful woman I had seen in my travels. And how one dare 
show such a theft to any person of taste, is quite as singular. 
Even when a whole column or statue is carried away, its 
main charm is gone with the association of the place. I 
venture to presume,, that no person of classic feeling ever 
saw Lord Elgin's marbles without execrating the folly that 
could bring them from their bright native sky. 

The Erechtheion and the adjoining temple are gems of 
architecture. The small portico of the caryatides (female 
figures, in the place of columns, with their hands on their 
hips) must have been one of the most exquisite things in 
Greece. One of them (fallen in consequence of Lord 
Elgin's removal of the sister statue) lies headless on the 
ground, and the remaining ones are badly mutilated, but 
they are very, very beautiful. I remember two in the 
Villa Albani at Rome, brought from some other temple 
in Greece, and considered the choicest gems of the 
gallery. 

We climbed up to the sanctuary of the Erechtheion, in 
which stood the altars to the two elements to which the 
temples were dedicated. The sculpture around the cor* 
nices is still so sharp, that it might have been finished yes- 
terday. The youg antiquary alluded to Byron's anathema 
against Lord Elgin, in ' Childe Harold/ and showed me, 
on the inside of the capital of one of the columns, the place 
where the poet had written his name. It was simply 

* Byron says of these three girls in one of his letters to Dr. Drury : " I almost 
forgot to tell you, that I am dying for love of three Greek girls, at Athens, sisters. 
I lived in the same house. Teresa, Mariarma, and Katinka, are the names of these 
ilivinities— all under fifteen." 

p 2 



212 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

*' Byron," in small letters, and would not be noticed by an 
ordinary observer. 

If the lover, as the poet sings, was jealous of the star his 
mistress gazed upon, the sister of the " Maid of Athens," 
may well be jealous of the Parthenon. Petarches looks at 
it and talks of it with a fever in his eyes. I could riot help 
smiling at his enthusiasm. He is about twenty-five, of a 
slender person, with downcast, melancholy eyes, and looks 
the poet according to the most received standard. His re- 
served manners melted towards me on discovering that I 
knew our countryman, Dr. Howe, who he tells me was his 
groomsman, (or the corresponding assistant at a Greek 
wedding,) and to whom he seems, in common with all his 
countrymen, warmly attached. To a man of his taste, I 
can conceive nothing more gratifying than his appoint- 
ment to the care of the Acropolis. He spends his day there 
with his book, attending the few travellers who come - T 
and when the temples are deserted, he sits down in the 
shadow of a column, and reads amid the silence of the 
ruins he almost worships. There are few vocations in this 
envious world so separated from the jarring passions our 

nature. 

****** 

Passed the morning on horseback, visiting the antiquities 
without the city. Turning by the temple of Theseus, we 
crossed Mars' Hill, the seat of the Areopagus, and, passing 
a small valley, ascended the Pnyx. On the right of the 
path we observed the rock of the hill worn to the polish of 
enamel by friction. It<was an almost perpendicular descent 
of six or seven feet, and steps were cut at the sides to mount 
to the top. It is the famous sliding stone, believed by the 
Athenians to possess the power of determining the sex of 
unborn children. The preference of sons, if the polish of 
the stone is to be trusted, is universal in Greece. 

The rostrum of Demosthenes was above us on the side of 
the hill facing from the sea. A small platform is cut into 
the rock, and on either side a seat is hewn out, probably 
for the distinguished men of the State. The audience stood 
fpv ; j£it side-hill, and the orator and his listeners were in the 
©pen air. An older rostrum is cut into the summit of the 
hlii facing the sea. It is said that when the maritime com- 



THE ROSTRUM OF DEMOSTHENES. 2 IS 

mevce of Greece began to enrich the lower classes, the 
Thirty Tyrants turned the rostrum towards the land, lest 
their orators should point to the ships of the Piraeus, and 
remind the people of their power. 

Scene after scene swept through my fancy as I stood on 
the spot. I saw Demosthenes, after his first unsuccessful 
oration, descending with a dejected air towards the temple 
of Theseus, followed by old Eunomas, abandoning himself 
to despair, and repressing the fiery consciousness within 
him as a hopeless ambition. I saw him again with the last 
glowing period of a Philippic on his lips, standing on this. 
rocky eminence, his arm stretched towards Macedon, his eye 
flashing with success, and his ear catching the low murmur 
of the crowd below, which told him he had moved his 
country as with the heave of an earthquake. I saw the 
calm Aristides rise, with his mantle folded majestically* 
about him ; and the handsome Alcibiades waiting with a 
smile on his lips to speak ; and Socrates gazing on his wild 
but winning disciple with affection and fear. How easily 
is this bare rock, whereon the eagle now alights unaf- 
f righted, re-peopled with the crowding shadows of the 
past ! 



LETTER XIII. 



the prison of socrates turkish stirrups and saddles 

plato's academy — the American missionary school at 
athens — the son of petarches, and nephew of u mrs. 
black of egina." 

Sept. 10, 1833. 

Athens. — We dismounted at the door of Socrates' prison. 
A hill between the Areopagus and the sea is crowned with 
the remains of a showy monument to a Roman proconsul. 
Just beneath it, the hill forms a low precipice, and in the 
face of it you see three low entrances to caverns hewn in 
the solid rock. The farthest to the right was the room of 
the Athenian guard, and within it is a chamber with a 
Tound ceiling, which the sage occupied during the thirty 
<lays of his imprisonment. There are marks of an iron doot 



214? PENCILLING!* BY THE WAY. 

which separated it from the guard-room, and through the 
bars of this he refused the assistance of his friends to escape, 
and held those conversations with Crito, Plato, and others, 
which have made his name immortal. On the day upon 
which he was doomed to die, he was removed to the cham- 
ber nearest the Acropolis, and here the hemlock was pre- 
sented to him. A shallower excavation between held an 
altar to the gods ; and after his death, his body was here 
given to his friends. 

Nothing, except some of the touching narrations of Scrip- 
ture, ever seemed to me so affecting as the history of the 
death of Socrates. It has been likened (I think, not pro- 
fanely) to that of Christ. His virtuous life, his belief in 
the immortality of the soul, and a future state of reward 
and punishment, his forgiveness of his enemies, and his 
godlike death, certainly prove him, in the absence of re- 
vealed light, to have walked the " darkling path of human 
reason " with an almost inspired rectitude. 1 stood in the 
chamber which had received his last breath, not without 
emotion. The rocky walls about me had witnessed his 
composure as he received the cup from his weeping jailer : 
the roughly-hewn floor beneath my feet had sustained him, 
as he walked to and fro, till the poison had chilled his limbs ; 
his last sigh, as he covered his head with his mantle and 
expired, passed forth by that low portal. It is not easy to 
be indifferent on spots like these. The spirit of the place 
is felt. We cannot turn back and touch the brighter links 
of that <e fleshly chain," in which all human beings since 
the Creation have been bound alike, without feeling, even 
through the rusty coil of ages, the electric sympathy. 
Socrates died here ! The great human leap into eternity, 
the inevitable calamity of our race, was here taken more 
nobly than elsewhere. Whether the effect be to " fright 
us from the shore," or to nerve us, by the example, to look 
more steadily before us, a serious thought, almost of course 
a salutary one, lurks in the very air. 

We descended the hill and galloped our small Turkish 
horses at a stirring pace over the plain. The short stirrup 
and high-peaked saddle of the country are (at least to men 
of my length of limb) uncomfortable contrivances. With 
the knees almost up to the chin, one is compelled, of course, 



plato's academy. 216 

to lean far over the horse's head, and it requires all the 
fulness of Turkish trowsers to conceal the awkwardness of 
the positions. We drew rein at the entrance of the fct olive- 
grove." Our horses walked leisurely along the shaded path 
between the trees, and we arrived in a few minutes at the 
site of Plato's Academy. The more ethereal portion of my 
pleasure in seeing it must be in the recollection. The Ce- 
phissus was dry, the noon-day sun was hot, and we were 
glad to stop, with throbbing temples, under a cluster of fig- 
trees, and eat the delicious fruit, forgetting ail the philo- 
sophers incontinently. We sat in our saddles, and a Greek 
woman of great natural beauty, though dressed in rags, 
bent down the boughs to our reach. The honey from the 
over-ripe figs dropped upon us as the wind shook the 
branches. Our dark-eyed and bright -lipped Pomona served 
us with a grace and cheerfulness that would draw me often 
to the neighbourhood of the Academy if I lived in Athens. 
I venture to believe that Phryne herself, in so mean a dress, 
would scarce have been more attractive. We kissed our 
hands to her as our spirited horses leaped the hollow with 
"which the trees were encircled, and passing the mound 
sacred to the Furies, where CEdipus was swallowed up, 
dashed over the sultry plain once more, and were soon in 

Athens. 

****** 

l have passed most of my leisure hours here in a scene I 
certainly did not reckon in anticipation, among the pleasures 
of a visit to Athens — the American missionary school. We 
have all been delighted with it, from the commodore to the 
youngest midshipman. Mr. and Mrs. Hill have been here 
some four or five years, and have attained their present de- 
gree of success in the face of every difficulty. Their whole 
number of scholars from the commencement has been up- 
wards of three hundred ; at present they have a hundred 
and thirty, mostly girls. 

We found the school in a new and spacious stone build- 
ing on the site of the ancient " market," where Paul, on 
his visit to Athens, " disputed daily with those that met 
with him." A large court-yard, shaded partly w r ith a 
pomegranate tree, separates it from the marble portico of 
the Agora, which is one of the finest remains of antiquity. 



216 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

Mrs. Hill was in the midst of the little Athenians. Two 
or three serious-looking Greek girls were assisting her in 
regulating their movements, and the new and admirable 
system of combined instruction and amusement was going 
on swimmingly. There were, perhaps, a hundred children 
on the benches, mostly from three to six or eight years of 
age dark-eyed, cheerful little creatures, who looked as if 
their " birthright of the golden grasshopper," had made 
them Nature's favourites as certainly as in the days when 
their ancestor-mothers settled questions of philosophy. 
They marched and recited, and clapped their sun-burnt 
hands, and sung hymns, and I thought I never had seen a 
more gratifying spectacle. I looked around in vain for one 
who seemed discontented or weary. Mrs. Hill's manner to 
them was most affectionate. She governs, literally, with 
a smile. 

I selected several little favourites. One was a fine fellow 
of two to three years, whose name I inquired immediately. 
He was Plato Petarches, the nephew of the " Maid of 
Athens," and the son of the second of the three girls so ad- 
mired by Lord Byron. Another was a girl of six or seven, 
with a face surpassing, for expressive beauty, that of any 
child I ever saw. She was a Hydriote by birth, and dressed 
in the costume of the islands. Her little feet were in Greek 
slippers ; her figure was prettily set off with an open jacket, 
laced with buttons from the shoulder to the waist, and her 
head was enveloped in a figured handkerchief, folded grace- 
fullv in the stvle of a turban, and brought under her chin, 
so as to show suspended a rich metallic fringe. Her face 
was full, but marked with childish dimples, and her mouth 
and eyes, as beautiful as ever those expressive features were 
made, had a retiring seriousness in them, indescribably 
sweet. She looked as if she had been born in some scene 
of Turkish devastation, and had brought her mother's heart- 
ache into the world. 

At noon, at the sound of a bell, they marched out, clap- 
ping their hands in time to the instructors voice, and 
seated themselves in order upon the portico, in front of the 
school. Here their baskets were given them, and each one 
produced her dinner and ate it with the utmost propriety. 
It was really a beautiful scene. 



SCHOOL AT ATHENS. 217 

It is to be remembered that here is educated a class of 
numan beings who were else deprived of instruction by the 
universal custom of their country. The females of Greece 
are suffered to grow up in ignorance. One who can read 
and write is rarely found. The school has commenced 
fortunately at the most favourable moment. The govern- 
ment was in process of change, and an innovation was 
unnoticed in the confusion that at a later period might 
have been opposed by the prejudices of custom. The 
king and the president of the regency, Count Armansberg, 
visited the school frequently during their stay in Athens, 
and expressed their thanks to Mrs. Hill warmly. The 
Countess Armansberg called repeatedly to have the pleasure 
of sitting in the school-room for an hour. His Majesty, 
indeed, could hardly find a more useful subject in his realm. 
Mrs. Hill, with her own personal efforts, has taught more 
than one hundred children to read the Bible. How few of 
us can write against our names an equal offset to the claims 
of human duty! 

Circumstances made me acquainted with one or two 
wealthy persons residing in Athens, and I received from 
them a strong impression of Mr. Hill's usefulness and high 
standing. His house is the hospitable resort of every stran- 
ger of intelligence and respectability. 

I passed my last evening among the magnificent ruins on 
the banks of the Ilissus. The next day was occupied in 
returning visits to the families who had been polite to us, 
and, with a farewell of unusual regret to our estimable 
missionary friends, we started on horseback to return by a 
gloomy sunset to the Piraeus. I am looking more for the 
amusing than the useful, in my rambles about the world ; 
and I confess I should not have gone far out of my way to 
visit a missionary station anywhere. But chance has thrown 
this of Athens across my path, and I record it as a moral 
spectacle to which no thinking person could be indifferent. 
I freely say I never have met with an equal number of my 
fellow- creatures, who seemed to me so indisputably and 
purely useful. The most cavilling mind must applaud their 
devoted sense of duty, bearing up against exile from coun- 
try and friends, privations, trial of patience, and the many, 
many ills inevitable to such an errand in a foreign land, 



218 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 






while even the coldest politician would find in their efforts 
the best promise for an enlightened renovation of Greece. 

Long after the twilight thickened immediately about us,, 
the lofty Acropolis stood up, bathed in a glow of light from 
the lingering sunset. I turned back to gaze upon it with 
an enthusiasm I had thought laid on the shelf with my half- 
forgotten classics. The intrinsic beauty of the ruins of 
Greece, the loneliness of their situation, and the divine cli- 
mate in which, to use Byron's expression, they are " buried," 
invest them with an interest which surrounds no other 
antiquities in the world. I rode on, repeating to myself 
Milton's beautiful description : 

" Look ! on the Egean shore a city stands 
Built nobly; pure the air and light the soil; 
Athens — the eye of Greece, mother of arts 
And eloquence ; native to famous wits 
Or hospitable, in her sweet recess, 
City or suburban, studious walks or shades. 
See, there the olive-groves of Academe, 
Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird 
Trills her thick- war bled notes the summer long. 
There, flowery hill, Hymettus, with the sound 
Of bees' industrious murmurs, oft invites 
To studious musing; there Ilissus rolls 
His whispering stream ; within the walls there view 
The schools of ancient sages, his who bred 
Great Alexander to subdue the world! " 



LETTER XIV. 






THE PIR.ETJS — THE SACRA VIA RUINS OF ELEUSIS GIGANTIC 

MEDALLION COSTUME OF THE ATHENIAN WOMEN THE TOMB 

OF THEMISTOCLES THE TEMPLE OF MINERVA. 

Sept. 1853. 

Pir^us. — With a basket of ham and claret in the stern- 
sheets, a cool awning over our heads, and twelve men a*, 
the oars, such as the coxswain of ^^^8^168* galley migh 
have sighed for, we pulled away from the ship at an early 
hour, for Eleusis. The conqueror of Salamis delayed the 
battle for the ten o'clock breeze ; and as Nature (which 



SALAMIS. 219 

should be called he instead of she, for her constancy) still 
ruffles the iEgean at the same hour, we had a calm sea 
through the strait where once lay the ei ships by thou- 
sands." 

We soon rounded the point, and shot along under the 

" Rocky brow 
Which looks o'er sea-born Salamis." 

It is a bare, bold precipice, a little back from the sea, and 
commands an entire view of the strait. Here sat Xerxes, 
tc on his throne of gold,* with many secretaries about him 
to write down the particulars of the action. ,, The Athenians 
owed their victory to the wisdom of Themistocles, who 
managed to draw the Persians into the strait, (scarce a 
cannon-shot across just here) where only a small part ot 
their immense fleet could act at one time. The wind, as 
the wily Greek had foreseen, rose at the same time, and 
rendered the lofty-built Persian ships unmanageable ; while 
the Athenian galleys, cut low to the water, were easily 
brought into action in the most advantageous position. It 
is impossible to look upon this beautiful and lovely spot, 
and imagine the stirring picture it presented. The wild 
sea-bird knows no lonelier place. Yet on that rock once 
sat the son of Darius, with his royal purple floating to the 
wind, and, below him, within these rocky limits, lay " one 
thousand two hundred ships of war, and two thousand 
transports/' while behind him, on the shores of the Piraeus, 
were encamped " seven hundred thousand foot and four 
hundred thousand horse" — "amounting," says Potter in 
his notes, " with the retinue of women and servants that 
attended the Asiatic princes in their military expeditions, 
to more than five millions." How like a king must the 
royal Persian have felt, when 

" He counted them at break of day ! " 

With an hour or two of fast pulling, we opened into the 
broad bav of Eleusis. The first Sabbath after the Creation 



* So says Phanodemus, quoted by Plutarch. The commentators upon the 
tragedy of iEschylus on this subject say it was a " silver chair," and that it "was 
•tfterwards placed in the temple of Minerva at Athens, with .he golden-hilted clmete* 
of Mardonius." 



220 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

could not have been more absolutely silent. Megara was 
away on the left, Eleusis before us at the distance of four 
or five miles, and the broad plains where agriculture was 
first taught by Triptolemus, the poetical home of Ceres, 
lay an utter desert in the sunshine. Behind us, between 
the mountains, descended the Sacra Via, by which the 
procession came from Athens to celebrate the Eleusinian 
Mysteries — a road of five or six miles, lined, in the time of 
Pericles, with temples and tombs. 1 could half fancy the 
scene as it was presented to the eyes of the invading Mace- 
donians — when the procession of priests and virgins, accom- 
panied by the whole population of Athens, wound down 
into the plain, guarded by the shining spears of the army 
of Alcibiades. It is still doubtful, I believe, whether these 
imposing ceremonies were the pure observances of a lofty 
and sincere superstition, or the orgies of a licentious Satur- 
nalia. 

We landed at Eleusis, and were immediately surrounded 
by a crowd of people, as simple and curious in their man- 
ners, and resembling somewhat, in their dress and com- 
plexion, the Indians of our country. The ruins of a great 
city lay about us, and their huts were built promiscuously 
among them. Magnificent fragments of columns and blocks 
of marble interrupted the path through the village, and 
between two of the houses lay, half buried, a gigantic 
medallion of Pentelic marble, representing, in alto relievo, 
the body and head of a warrior in full armour. A hundred 
men would move it with difficulty. Commodore Patterson 
attempted it six years ago in the ' Constitution,' but his 
launch was found unequal to its weight. 

The people here gathered more closely around the ladies 
of our party, examining their dress with childish curiosity. 
They were doubtless the first females ever seen at Eleusis 
in European costume. One of the ladies happening to pull 
off her glove, there was a general cry of astonishment. The 
brown kid had clearly been taken as the colour of the hand. 
Some curiosity was then shown to see their faces, which 
were covered with thick green veils, as a protection against 
the sun. The sight of their complexions ( in any country 
remarkable for a dazzling whiteness ) completed the aston- 
ishment of these children of Ceres. 



ELEUSIS. 22* 

We, on our part, were scarcely less amused with their 
costumes in turn. Over the petticoat was worn a loose 
jacket of white cloth reaching to the knee, and open in 
front — its edges and sleeves wrought very tastefully with 
red cord. The head-dress was composed entirely of money. 
A fillet of gold sequins was iirst put, d la feroniere, around 
tke forehead, and a close cap, with a throat-piece like the 
gorget of a helmet, fitted the skull exactly, stitched with 
coins of all values, folded over each other according to their 
sizes, like scales. The hair was then braided, and fell down 
the back, loaded also with money. Of the fifty or sixty 
women we saw, I should think one half had money on her 
head to the amount of from one to two hundred dollars. 
They suffered us to examine them with perfect good-humour. 
The greater proportion of pieces were paras, a small and 
thin Turkish coin of very small value. Among the larger 
pieces were dollars of all nations, five- franc pieces, Sicilian 
piastres, Tuscan colonati, Venetian swansicas, &c. &c. I 
doubted much whether they were not the collections of 
some piratical caique. There is no possibility of either 
spending or getting money within many miles of Eleusis, 
and it seemed to be looked upon as an ornament which they 
had come too lightly by to know its use. 

We walked over the foundations of several large temples, 
with the remains of their splendour lying unvalued about 
them, and at half a mile from the village came to the " well 
of Proserpine/' whence, say the poets, the ravished daughter 
of Ceres emerged from the infernal regions on her visits to 
her mother. The modern Eleusinians know it only as a 
well of the purest water. 

On our return we stopped at the southern point of the 
Piraeus, to see the tomb of Themistocles. We were directed 
to it by thirteen or fourteen frustra of enormous columns, 
which once formed the monument to his memory. They 
buried him close to the edge of the sea, opposite Salamis. 
The continual beat of the waves for so many hundred years 
has worn away the promontory, and his sarcophagus, which 
was laid in a grave cut in the solid rock, is now filled by 
every swell from the iEgean. The old hero was brought 
back from his exile to be gloriously buried. He could not 
lie better for the repose of his spirit, (if it returned with 



222 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAi. 

his bones from Argos.) The sea on which he beat the 
haughty Persians with his handful of galleys sends every 
wave to his feet. The hollows in the rock around his grave 
are full of snowy salt left by the evaporation. You might 
scrape up a bushel within six feet of him. It seems a natural 
tribute to his memory.* 

On a high and lonely rock, stretching out into the midst 
of the sea, stands a solitary temple. As far as the eye can 
r.each, along the coast of Attica and to the distant isles, 
there is no sign of human habitation. There it stands, 
lifted into the blue sky of Greece, like the unreal " fabric 
of a vision." 

Cape Colonna and its " temple of Minerva " were familiar 
to my memory, but my imagination had pictured nothing 
half so beautiful. As we approached it from the sea, it 
seemed so strangely out of place, even for a ruin, so far 
removed from what had ever been the haunt of man, that I 
scarce credited my eyes. We could soon count them — 
thirteen columns of sparkling marble, glittering in the sun. 
The sea-air keeps them spotlessly white, and, until you ap- 
proach them nearly, they have the appearance of a structure, 
From its freshness, still in the sculptor's hands. 

The boat was lowered, and the ship lay off-and-on while 
we landed near the rocks where Falconer was shipwrecked, 
and mounted to the temple. The summit of the promontory 
Is strewn with the remains of the fallen columns, and their 
smooth surfaces are thickly inscribed with the names of 
travellers. Among other's, I noticed Byron's and Hob- 
house's. Byron, by the way, mentions having narrowly 
escaped robbery here, by a band of Mainote pirates. He 
was surprised, swimming off the point, by an English vessel 
containing some ladies of his acquaintance. He concludes 
the ' Isles of Greece ' beautifully with an allusion to it by 
its ancient name : 

" Place me on Sunium's marbled steep," &c' 

The view from the summit is one of the finest in all 
Greece. The isle w T here Plato was sold as a slave, and 

* Langhorne say in his notes on Plutarch, " There is the genuine Attic salt in 
most of the retorts and observations of Themistocles. His wit seems to have been 
eqpial to his military and political capacity .* 



CAPE COLONNA. 223 

where Aristides and Demosthenes passed their days in exile 
stretches along the west ; the wide iEgean, sprinkled with 
here and there a solitary rock, herbless but beautiful in its 
veil of mist, spreads away from its feet to the southern line 
of the horizon, and crossing each other almost imperceptibly 
on the light winds of this summer sea, fhe red-sailed caique 
of Greece, the merchantmen from the Dardanelles, and the 
heavy men-of-war of England and France, cruising wherever 
the wind blows fairest, are seen like broad- winged and soli- 
tary birds, lying low with spread pinions upon the waters. 
The place touched me. I shall remember it with an affec- 
tion. 

There is a small island close to Sunium, which was forti- 
fied by one of the heroes of the Iliad on his return from 
Troy — why, Heaven only knows. It was here, too, that 
Phrontes, the pilot of Menelaus, died and was buried. 

We returned on board after an absence of two hours from 
the ship, and are steering now straight for the Dardanelles. 
The plains of Marathon are but a few hours north of our 
course, and I pass them unwillingly; but what is there one 
would not see ? Greece lies behind, and I have realised 
one of my dearest dreams in rambling over its ruins. Travel 
is an appetite that " grows by what it feeds on." 



LETTER XV. 

JtflTYLENE THE TOMB OF ACHILLES — TURKISH BURYING-GROUND 

LOST REPUTATION OF THE SCAMANDER ASIATIC SUNSETS — ■ 

VISIT TO A TURKISH BEY — THE CASTLES OF THE DARDANELLES 
TURKISH BATH, AND ITS CONSEQUENCES. 

Sy*l. 1833. 

Lesbos to windward. A caique, crowded with people, is 
running across our bow, all hands singing a wild chorus 
(perhaps the Lesbmim carmen) most merrily. The island 
is now called Mitylene, said to be the greenest and most 
fertile of the Mediterranean. The Lesbean wine is still 
good, but they have had no poetesses since Sappho. Cause 
and effect have quarrelled, one would think. 



224 PENCILLING,? BY THE WAY. 

Tenedos on the lee. The tomb of Achilles is distinguish- 
able with the glass on the coast of Asia. The column which 
Alexander *' crowned and anointed, and danced around 
naked/' in honour of the hero's ghost, stands above it no 
longer. The Macedonian wept over Achilles, says the 
school-book, and envied him the blind bard who had sung 
his deeds. He would have dried his tears if he had known 
that his pas seul would be remembered as long. 

Tenedos seems a pretty island as we near it. It was 
here that the Greeks hid, to persuade the Trojans that they 
had abandoned the siege, while the wooden horse was 
wheeled into Troy. The site of the city of Priam is visible 
as we get nearer the coast of Asia. Mount Ida and the 
marshy valley of the Scamander, are appearing beyond 
Cape Sigseum, and we shall anchor in an hour between 
Europe and Asia, in the mouth of the rapid Darnanelles. 
The wind is not strong enough to stem the current that 
sets down like a mill-race from the sea of Marmora. 

Went ashore on the Asian side for a ramble. We landed 
at the strong Turkish castle that, with another on the 
European side, defends the strait, and, passing under their 
bristling batteries, entered the small Turkish town in the 
rear. Our appearance excited a great deal of curiosity. 
The Turks, who were sitting cross-legged on the broad 
benches, extending like a tailor's board, in front of the 
cafes, stopped smoking as we passed, and the women, 
wrapping up their own faces more closely, approached the 
ladies of our party and lifted their veils to look at them 
with the freedom of our friends at Eleusis. We came 
unaware upon two squalid wretches of women in turning 
a corner, who pulled their ragged shawls over their heads 
with looks of the greatest resentment at having exposed 
their faces to us. 

A few minutes' walk brought us outside of the town. 
An extensive Turkish grave-yard lay on the left. Between 
fig-trees and blackberry-bushes it was a green spot, and the 
low tombstones of the men, crowned each with a turban 
carved in marble of the shape befitting the sleeper's rank, 
peered above the grass like a congregation sitting in a 
uniform head-dress at a field preaching. Had it not been 
for the female graves, which were marked with a slab like 



THE SCAMANDER. 225 

ours, and here and there the tombstone of a Greek, carved 
after the antique, in the shape of a beautiful shell, the 
effect of an assemblage sur Vherb would have been ludi- 
crously perfect. 

We walked on to the Scamander. A rickety bridge gave 
us a passage, toll free, to the other side, where we sat round 
the rim of a marble well, and ate delicious grapes stolen 
for us by a Turkish boy from a near vineyard. Six or seven 
camels were feeding on the uninclosed plain, picking a 
mouthful and then lifting their long, snaky necks into the 
air to swallow; a stray horseman, with the head of his 
bridle decked with red tassels, and his knees up to his chin, 
scoured the bridle path to the mountains; and three devilish- 
looking buffaloes scratched their hides and rolled up 
their fiendish green eyes under a bramble-hedge near the 
river. 

The poets lie, or the Scamander is as treacherous as 
Macassar. Venus bathed in its waters before contending 
for the prize of beauty, adjudged to her on this very Mount 
Ida that 1 see covered with brown grass in the distance. 
Her hair became " flowing gold " in the lavation. My 
friends compliment me upon no change after a similar 
experiment. My long locks (run riot with a four months' 
cruise) are as dingy and untractable as ever, and, except in 
the increased brownness of a Mediterranean complexion, the 
cracked glass in the state-room of my friend the lieutenant 
gives me no encouragement of a change. It is soft water, 
and runs over fine white sand $ but the fountain of 
Callirhoe,at Athens, (she was the daughter of the Scamander, 
and, like most daughters, is much more attractive than her 
papa) is softer and clearer. Perhaps the loss of the 
Scamander's virtues is attributable to the cessation of the 
tribute paid to the god in Helen's time. 

The twilights in this part of the world are unparalleled — 
but I have described twilights and sunsets in Greece and 
Italy till I am ashamed to write the words. Each 01? 
comes as if there never had been and never were to be 
another ; and the adventures of the day, however stirring, 
are half forgotten in its glory, and seem, in comparison, 
unworthy of description ; but one look at the terms that 
might describe it, written on paper, uncharms even the 

Q 



226 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

remembrance. You must come to Asia and feel sunsets 
You cannot get them by paying postage. 

At anchor, waiting for a wind. Called to-day on the 
Bey EfFendi, commander of the two castles " Europe" and 
6( Asia/' between which we lie. A pokerish-looking dwarf, 
with ragged beard and high turban, and a tall Turk, who 
I am sure never smiled since he was born, kicked off their 
slippers at the threshold, and ushered us into a chamber on 
the second story. It was a luxurious little room lined 
completely with cushions, the muslin-covered pillows of 
down leaving only a place for the door. The divan was as 
broad as a bed, and, save the difficulty of rising from it, it 
was perfect as a lounge. A ceiling of inlaid woods, em- 
browned with smoke, windows of small panes fantastically 
set, and a place lower than the floor for the attendants to 
stand and leave their slippers, were all that was peculiar 

else. 

* * * * •* * 

The bey entered in a few minutes with a pipe-bearer, an 
interpreter, and three or four attendants. He was a young 
man, about twenty, and excessively handsome. A clear, 
olive complexion; a moustache of silky black; a thin, 
aquiline nose, with almost transparent nostrils; cheeks and 
chin rounded into'ti perfect oval, and mouth and eyes ex, 
pressive of the most resolute firmness, and, at the same 
time, girlishly beautiful, completed the picture of the finest 
looking fellow I have seen within my recollection. His 
person was very slight, and his feet and hands small, and 
particularly well-shaped. Like most of his countrymen of 
latter years, his dress was half European, and much less 
becoming, of course, than the turban and trowser. Panta- 
loons, rather loose ; a light fawn-coloured short jacket; a 
red cap, with a blue tassel; and stockings, without shoes 
were enough to give him the appearance of a dandy half 
through his toilet. He entered with an indolent step, 
bowed, without smiling, and throwing one of his feet under 
him, sunk down upon the divan, and beckoned for his pipe* 
The Turk in attendance kicked ofF his slippers, and gave 
him the long tube with its amber mouthpiece, setting the 
bowl into a basin in the centre of the room. The bey put 



INTERVIEW WITH THE BEY. 227 

it to his handsome lips, and drew till the smoke mounted to 
the ceiling, and then handed it, with a graceful gesture, to 
the commodore. 

The conversation went on through two interpretations. 
The bey's interpreter spoke Greek and Turkish, and the 
ship's pilot who accompanied us, spoke Greek and English, 
and the usual expressions of good feeling and ofFers of 
mutual service were thus passed between the pufFs of the 
pipe with sufficient facility. The dwarf soon after entered 
with coffee. The small gilded cups had about the capacity 
of a goodwife's thimble, and were covered with gold tops to 
retain the aroma. The fragrance of the rich berry filled 
the room. We acknowledged, at once, the superiority of 
the Turkish manner of preparing it. It is excessively 
strong, and drunk without milk. I looked into every 
corner while the attendants were removing the cups, but 
could see no trace of a book. Ten or twelve guns, with 
stocks inlaid with pearl and silver, two or three pair of 
gold-handled pistols, and a superb Turkish cimeter and 
belt, hung upon the walls, but there was no other furniture, 
We rose, after a half hour's visit, and were bowed out by 
the handsome Effendi, coldly and politely. As we passed 
under the walls of the castle, on the way to the boat, we 
saw six or seven women, probably a part of his harem, 
peeping from the embrasures of one of the bastions. Their 
heads were wrapped in white; one eye only left visible. 
t was easy to imagine them Zuleikas after having seen 
.heir master. 

Went ashore at Castle Europe, with one or two of the 
officers, to take a bath. An old Turk, sitting upon his 
bams, at the entrance, pointed to the low door at his side, 
without looking at us, and we descended, by a step or two, 
into a vaulted hall, with a large, circular ottoman in the 
centre, and a very broad divan ail around. Two tall young 
mussulmen, with only turbans and waistcloths to conceal 
their natural proportions, assisted us to undress, and led us 
into a stone room, several degrees warmer than the first. 
We walked about here for a few minutes, and as we began 
u.0 perspire, were taken into another, filled with hot vapour, 
and, for the first moment or two almost intolerable. It 
was shaped like a dome, with twenty or thirty small 

Q2 



228 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

-windows at the top, several basins at the sides into which 
hot water was pouring, and a raised stone platform in the 
centre, upon which we were all requested, by gestures, to 
lie upon our backs. The perspiration at this time was 
pouring from us like rain. I lay down with the others, 
and a Turk, a dark-skinned, fine-looking fellow, drew on a 
mitten of rough grass cloth, and, laying one hand upon my 
"breast to hold me steady, commenced rubbing me, without 
water, violently. The skin peeled off under the friction, 
and I thought he must have rubbed into the flesh repeatedly* 
Nothing but curiosity to go through the regular operation 
of a Turkish bath prevented my crying out " Enough I" 
He rubbed away, turning me from side to side, till the 
rough glove passed smoothly all over my body and limbs, 
and then, handing me a pair of wooden slippers, suffered 
me to rise. I walked about for a few minutes, looking with 
surprise at the rolls of skin he had taken off, and feeling 
almost transparent as the hot air blew upon me. 

In a few minutes my mussulman beckoned to me to fol- 
low him to a smaller room, where he seated me on a stone 
beside a font of hot water. He then made some thick soap- 
suds in a basin, and, with a handful of fine flax, soaped and 
rubbed me all over again, and a few dashes of the hot 
water, from a wooden saucer, completed the bath. 

The next room, which had seemed so warm on our en- 
trance, was now quite chilly. We remained here until we 
were dry, and then returned to the hall in which our 
clothes were left, where beds were prepared on the divans, 
and we were covered in warm cloths, and left to our repose. 
The disposition to sleep was almost irresistible. We rose 
in a short time, and went to the coffee-house opposite, when 
& cup of strong coffee, and a hookah smoked through a 
highly ornamented glass bubbling with water, refreshed us 
deliciously. 

I have had ever since a feeling of suppleness and light- 
ness, which is like wings growing at my feet. It is cer- 
tainly a very great luxury, though, unquestionably, most 
enervating as a habit. 






FETE AT TROY 229 



LETTER XVI. 

A TURKISH PIC-NIC ON THE PLAIN OF TROY FINGERS VEH3TJS 

FORKS. 

Dardanelles. — The oddest invitation I ever had in my 
life was from a Turkish bey to a ftte cfiampetre on the 
ruins of Troy ! We have just returned, full of wassail and 
pillaw, by the light of an Asian moon. 

The morning was such a one as you would expect in the 
country where mornings were first made. The sun was 
clear, but the breeze was fresh, and, as we sat on the bey's 
soft divans, taking coffee before starting, I turned my cheek 
to the open window and confessed the blessing of existence. 

We were sixteen, from the ship, and our host was at- 
tended by his interpreter, the general of his troops, the 
governor of Boumabashi, (the name of the Turkish town 
near Troy) and a host of attendants on foot and horseback. 
His cook had been sent forward at daylight with the pro* 
visions. 

The handsome bey came to the door, and helped to mount 
us upon his own horses, and we rode off with the whole 
population of the village assembled to see our departure. 
We forded the Scamander, near the town, and pushed on 
at a hard gallop over the plain. The bey soon overtook us 
upon a fleet grey mare, caparisoned with red trappings, 
holding an umbrella over his head, which he courteously 
offered to the commodore on coming up. We followed a 
grass path, without hill or stone, for nine or ten miles, and 
after having passed one or two hamlets, with their open 
threshing-floors, and crossed the Simois, with the water to 
our saddle-girths, we left a slight rising ground by a sudden 
turn, and descended to a clusjter of trees, where the Turks 
sprang from their horses, and made signs for us to dismount. 

It was one of nature's drawing-rooms. Thickets oi 
brush and willows enclosed a fountain, whose clear waters 
were confined in a tank formed of marble slabs from the 
neighbouring ruins. A spreading tree above, and soft 
meadow grass to its very tip, left nothing to wish but 



... 30 PENCILL1NGS BY THE WAY. 

friends and a quiet mind to perfect its beauty. The cook's 
fires were smoking in the thicket ; the horses were grazing 
without saddle or bridle in the pasture below, and we lay 
down upon the soft Turkish carpets, spread beneath the 
trees, and reposed from our fatigues for an hour. 

The interpreter came when the sun had slanted ,a little 
across the trees, and invited us to the bey's gardens hard by. 
A path, overshadowed with wild brush, led us round the 
little meadow to a gate, close to the fountain-head of the 
Scamander. One of the common cottages of the country 
stood upon the left, and in front of it a large arbour, covered 
with a grape vine, was underlaid with cushions and carpets. 
Here we reclined, and coffee was brought us with baskets 
of grapes, figs, quinces, and pomegranates, the bey and his 
officers waiting on us themselves with amusing assiduity. 
The people of the house, meantime, were sent to the fields 
for green corn, which was roasted for us, and this with 
nuts, wine, and conversation, and a ramble to the source of 
the Simois, which bursts from a cleft in the rock very beau- 
tifully, whiled away the hours till dinner. 

About four o'clock we returned to the fountain. A white 
muslin cloth was laid upon the grass between the edge and 
the overshadowing tree, and all around it were spread the 
carpets upon which we were to recline while eating. Wine 
and melons were cooling in the tank, and plates of honey 
and grapes, and new-made butter, (a great luxury in the 
Archipelago,) stood on the marble rim. The dinner might 
have fed Priam's army. Half a lamb, turkeys and chickens, 
were the principal meats, but there was, besides, 6< a rabble 
rout " of made dishes, peculiar to the country, of ingredients 
at which I could not hazard even a conjecture. 

We crooked our legs under us with some awkwardness, 
and, producing our knives and forks, (which we had brought 
with the advice of the interpreter) commenced, somewhat 
abated in appetite by too liberal a lunch. The bey and 
Ins officers sitting upright, with their feet under them,, 
pinched off bits of meat dexterously with the thumb and 
forefinger, passing from one to the other a dish of rice, 
with a large spoon, which all used indiscriminately. It is : 
odd that eating with the fingers seemed only disgusting ta 
me in the bey. His European dress probably made the 



FETE AT TROY. 231 

peculiarity more glaring. The fat old governor who sat 
beside me was greased to the elbows, and his long grey 
beard was studded with rice and drops of gravy to his 
girdle. He rose when the meats were removed, and 
waddled off to the stream below, where a wash in the clean 
water made him once more a presentable person. 

It is a Turkish custom to rise and retire while the dishes 
are changing, and, after a little ramble through the meadow, 
we returned to a lavish spread of fruits and honey y which 
concluded the repast. 

It is doubted where Troy stood. The reputed site is a 
rising ground, near the fountain of Bournabashi, to which 
we strolled after dinner. We found nothing but quantities 
of fragments of columns, believed by antiquaries to be the 
ruins of a city that sprung up and died long since Troy. 

We mounted and rode home by a round moon, whose 
light filled the air like a dust of phosphoric silver. The 
plains were in a glow with it. Our Indian summer nights, 
beautiful as they are, give you no idea of an Asian moon. 

The bey's rooms were lit, and we took coffee with him 
once more, and, fatigued with pleasure and excitement, got 
to our boats, and pulled up against the arrowy current of 
the Dardanelles to the frigate. 



LETTER XVII. 

THE DARDANELLES — VISIT FROM THE PASHA — HIS DELIGHT AT 

HEARING THE PIANO TURKISH FOUNTAINS — CARAVAN OF 

MULES LADEN WITH GRAPES — TURKISH MODE OF LIVING; 

HOUSES ; CAFES $ AND WOMEN THE MOSQUE AND THE 

MUEZZIN. 

Coast of Asia. — We have lain in the mouth of the Dar- 
danelles sixteen mortal days, waiting for a wind. Like 
Don Juan, (who passed here on his way to Constantinople,) 

** Another time we might have liked to see 'em, 
But now are not much pleased with Cape Sigaeura." 



232 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

An occasional trip with the boats to the watering-place, a 
Turkish bath, and a stroll in the bazaar of the town behind 
the castle, gazing with a glass at the tombs of Ajax and 
Achilles, and the long, undulating shores of Asia, eating 
often and sleeping much, are the only appliances to our 
philosophy. One cannot always be thinking of Hero and 
Leander, though he lie in the Hellespont. 

A merchant brig from Smyrna is anchored just astern of 
us, waiting like ourselves for this eternal north-easter to 
.blow itself out. She has forty or fifty passengers for Con- 
stantinople, among whom are the wife of an American 
merchant, (a Greek lady,) and Mr. Schauffler, a missionary, 
in whom I recognised a quondam fellow-student. They 
were nearly starved out on board the brig, as she was pro- 
visioned but for a few days, and the Commodore has cour- 
teously offered them a passage in the frigate. Fifty or 
sixty sail lie below Castle Europe, in the same predica- 
ment. With the ic cap of King Ericus/' this cruising, 
pleasant as it is, would be a thought pleasanter to my 

fancy. 

****** 

Still wind-bound. The angel that 

te Look'd o'er my almanack 
And cross'd out my ill days," 

suffered a week or so to escape him here. Not that the 
ship is not pleasant enough, and the climate deserving of 
its Svbarite fame, and the sunsets and stars as much brighter 
than those of the rest of the world as Byron has described 
them to be, (vide letter to Leigh Hunt) but life has run 
in so deep a current with me of late, that the absence of 
incident seems like water without wine. The agreeable 
stir of travel, the incomplete adventure, the change of cos- 
tumes and scenery, the busy calls upon the curiosity and 
the imagination, have become, in a manner, very breath tc 
me. Hitherto upon the cruise, we have scarce ever been 
more than one or two days at a time out of port. Elba . 
Sicily, Naples, Vienna, the Ionian Isles, and the variouij 
ports of Greece, have come and gone so rapidly, and so 
entirely without exertion of my own, that I seem to have 



DARDANELLES. 233 

lived in a magic panorama. After dinner on one day I 
visit a city here, and, the day or two after, lounging and 
reading and sleeping meanwhile quietly at home. I find 
myself rising from table hundreds of miles farther to the 
north or east, and another famous city before me, having 
taken no care, and felt no motion, nor encountered danger 
or fatigue. A summer cruise in the Mediterranean is cer- 
tainly the perfection of sight-seeing. With a sea as smooth 
as a river, and cities of interest, classical and mercantile, 
everywhere on the lee, I can conceive no class of persons to 
whom it would not be delightful. A company of pleasure, 
in a private vessel, would see all Greece and Italy with less 
trouble and expense than is common on a trip to the lakes. 

" All hands up anchor ! " The dog- vane points at last 
to Constantinople. The capstan is manned, the sails loosed, 
the quarter-master at the wheel, and the wind freshens 
every moment from the " sweet south." " Heave round 
merrily ! " The anchor is dragged in by this rushing Hel- 
lespont, and holds on as if the bridge of Xerxes were tangled 
about the flukes. " Up she comes at last," and, yielding to 
her broad canvass, the gallant frigate begins to make head- 
way against the current. There is nothing in the whole 
world of senseless matter, so like a breathing creature as a 
ship ! The energy of her motion, the beauty of her shape 
and contrivance, and the ease with which she is managed 
by the one mind upon her quarter-deck, to whose voice she 
is as obedient as the courser to the rein, inspire me with 
daily admiration. I have been four months a guest in this 
noble man-of-war, and to this hour I never set my foot on 
her deck without a feeling of fresh wonder. And then 
Cooper's novels read in a ward- room as grapes eat in Tus- 
cany. It were missing one of the golden leaves of a life 
not to have thumbed them on a cruise. 

The wind has headed us off again, and we have dropped 
anchor just below the castles of the Dardanelles. We have 
made but eight miles, but we have new scenery from the 
ports, and that is something to a weary eye. I was as tired 
of " the shores of Ilion n as ever was Ulysses. The hills 
about our present anchorage are green and boldly marked, 
and the frowning castles above us give that addition to the 
landscape which is alone wanting on the Hudson. Sestos 



234 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

and Abydos are six or seven miles up the stream. The 
Asian shore (I should have thought it a pretty circumstance, 
once, to be able to set foot either in Europe or Asia in five 
minutes,) is enlivened by numbers of small vessels, tracking 
up with buffaloes against wind and tide. And here we lie, 
says the old pilot, without hope till the moon changes. 
The " fickle moon " quotha ! I wish my friends were half 
as constant ! 

The pasha of the Dardanelles has honoured us with a 
visit. He came in a long caique, pulled by twenty stout 
rascals ; his excellency of " two tails " sitting on a rich car- 
pet on the bottom of the boat, with his boy of a year old in 
the same uniform as himself, and his suite of pipe and 
slipper-bearers, dwarf, and executioner, sitting cross-legged 
about him. He was received with the euard and all the 
.honour due to his rank. His face is that of a cold, haughty, 
and resolute, but well-born man, and his son is like him. 
He looked at every thing attentively, without expressing 
any surprise, till he came to the piano-forte, which one of 
the ladies played to his undisguised delight. It was the 
first he had ever seen. He inquired through his interpreter 

if she had not been all her life in learning. 

* * * * * 

The poet says, " The seasons of the year come in like 
masquers." To one who had made their acquaintance in 
New- England, most of the months would literally pass 
incog, in Italy. But here is honest October, the same 
merry old gentleman, though I meet him in Asia, and I 
remember him last year at the baths of Lucca, as unchanged 
as here. It has been a clear, bright, invigorating day, with 
a vitality in the air as rousing to the spirits as a blast from 
the " horn of Astolpho/' I can remember just such a day 
ten years ago. It is odd how a little sunshine will cling to 
the memory when loves and hates, that in their time con- 
vulsed the very soul, are so easily forgotten. 

We heard yesterday that there was a Turkish village 
seven or eight miles in the mountains on the Asian side, and,, 
as a variety to the promenade on the quarter-deck, a ramble 
was proposed to it. 

We landed, this morning, on the bold shore of the Dar- 
danelles and, climbing up the face of a sand-hill, struck 



TURKISH VILLAGE. 235 

across a broad plain, through bush and 'orier, for a mile. 
On the edge of a ravine we found a pretty road, half em- 
bowered with oak and hemlock ; and a mounted Turk, 
whom we met soon after, with a gun across his pummel, 
and a goose looking from his saddle-bag, directed us to fol- 
low it till we reached the village. 

It was a beautiful path, flecked with the shade of leaves 
of all the variety of Eastern trees, and refreshed with a 
fountain at every mile. About half way we stopped at a 
spring welling from a rock, under a large fig-tree, from 
which the water poured, as clear as crystal, into seven tanks, 
and rippling away from the last into a wild thicket, whence 
a stripe of brighter green marked its course down the 
mountain. It was a spot worthy of Tempe. We seated 
ourselves on the rim of the rocky basin, and, with a drink 
of bright water, and a half hour's repose, recommenced our 
ascent, blessing the nymph of the fount, like true pilgrims 
of the East. 

A few steps beyond, we met a caravan of the pasha's 
tithe-gatherers, with mules laden with grapes ; the turbaned 
and showily-armed drivers, as they came winding down the 
dell, producing the picturesque effect of a theatrical ballet. 
They laid their hands on their breasts with grave courtesy 
as they approached, and we helped ourselves to the ripe^ 
blushing clusters, as the panniers went by, with Arcadian, 
freedom. 

We reached the summit of the ridge a little before noon,, 
and turned our faces back for a moment to catch the cool 
wind from the Hellespont. The Dardanelles came winding 
out from the hills just above Abydos, and, sweeping past 
the upper castles of Europe and Asia, rushed down by 
Tenedos into the Archipelago. Perhaps twenty miles of 
its course lay within our view. Its colours were borrowed 
from the divine sky above, and the rainbow is scarce more 
varied or brighter. The changing purple and blue of the 
mid-stream, specked with white crests ; the crysoprase 
green of the shallows, and the dyes of the various depths 
along the shore, gave it the appearance of a vein of trans- 
parent marble inlaid through the valley. The frigate 
looked like a child's boat ov* its bosom. To our left the 
tombs of Ajax and Achilles were just distinguishable in the 



•236 PEXCILLINGS BY THE WAT. 

plains of the Scamander, and Troy (if Troy ever stood) 
•stood back from the sea, and the blue-wreathed isles of the 
Archipelago bounded the reach of the eye. It was a view 
that might u cure a month's grief in a day." 

We descended now into a kind of cradle valley, yellow 
with rich vineyards. It was alive with people gathering 
in the grapes. The creaking waggons filled the road, and 
shouts and laughter rang over the mountain-sides merrily. 
The scene would have been Italian, but for the turbans 
peering out every where from the leaves, and those diabo- 
lical-looking buffaloes in the waggons. The village was a 
mile or two before us, and we loitered on, entering here 
and there a vinevard, where the onlv thing evidentlv 
grudged us was our peep at the women. They scattered 
like deer as we stepped over the walls. 

Near the village we found a grave Turk, of whom one 
of the officers made some inquiries, which were a part of 
-our errand to the mountains. It may spoil the sentiment 
2)f my description, but, in addition to the poetry of the 
ramble, we were to purchase beef for the mess. His bul- 
locks were out at grass, (feeding in pastoral security, poor 
things !) and he invited us to his house, while he sent his 
boy to drive them in. I recognised them, when they came, 
as two handsome steers, which had completed the beauty ot 
an open glade, in the centre of a clump of forest-trees, on 
our route. The pleasure they have afforded the eye will be 
repeated on the palate — a double destiny not accorded to 
•all beautiful creatures. 

Our host led us up a flight of rough stone steps to the 
second story of his house, where an old woman sat upon 
her heels, rolling out paste, and a younger one nursed a 
little Turk at her bosom. They had, like every man, 
woman, or child, I have seen in this country, superb eyes 
and noses. No chisel could improve the meanest of them 
in these features. Our friend's wife seemed ashamed to be 
caught with her face uncovered, but she offered us cushions 
on the floor before she retired, and her husband followed 
up her courtesy with his pipe. 

We went thence to the cafe, where a bubbling hookah, 
a cup of coffee, and a divan, refreshed us a little from our 
fatigues. While the rest of the party w r ere lingering over 



RAMBLE. 237 

their pipes, I took a turn through the village in search of 
the house of the Aga. After strolling up and down the 
crooked streets for half an hour, a pretty female figure, 
closely enveloped in her veil, and showing, as she ran across. 
the street, a dainty pair of feet in small yellow slippers, 
attracted me into the open court of the best-looking house 
in the village. The lady had disappeared, but a curious- 
looking carriage, lined with rich Turkey carpeting and 
cushions, and covered with red curtains, made to draw close 
in front, stood in the centre of the court. I was going up 
to examine it, when an old man, with a beard to his girdle, 
and an uncommonly rich turban, stepped from the house,, 
and motioned me angrily away. A large wolf-dog, which 
he held by the collar, added emphasis to his command, and 
I retreated directly. A giggle, and several female voices- 
from the closely-latticed window, rather aggravated the 
mortification. I had intruded on the premises of the Aga, 
a high offence in Turkey when a woman is in the case. 

It was " deep i* the afternoon " when we arrived at the 
beach, and made signal for a boat. We were on board as 
the sky kindled with the warm colours of an Asian sunset — 
a daily offset to our wearisome detention which goes far to 
keep me in temper. My fear is, that the commodore's, 
patience is not " so good a continuer " as this " vento male- 
detto," as the pilot calls it ; and in such a case I lose Con- 
stantinople most provokingly. 

Walked to the Upper Castle Asia, some eight miles above 
our anchorage. This is the main town on the Dardanelles,. 
and contains forty or fifty thousand inhabitants. Sestos and 
Abydos are a mile or two farther up the strait. 

We kept along the beach for an hour or two, passing 
occasionally a Turk on horseback, till we were stopped by a 
small and shallow creek without a bridge, just on the skirts 
of the town. A woman with one eye peeping from her 
veil, dressed in a tunic of fine blue cloth, stood at the head 
of a large drove of camels on the other side, and a beggar 
with one eye, smoked his pipe on the sand at a little dis- 
tance. The water was knee-deep, and we were hesitating 
on the brink, when the beggar offered to carry us across on 
his back — a task he accomplished (there were six of us) 
without taking his pipe from his mouth. 



£38 PENCILL1NGS BY THE WAY. 

I tried in vain to get a peep at the camel-driver's daughter, 
hut she seemed jealous of showing even her eyebrow, and I 
followed on to the town. The Turks live differently from 
every other people, I believe. You walk through their 
town, and see every individual in it, except perhaps the 
women of the pasha. Their houses are square boxes, the 
front side of which lifts on a hinge in the day-time, ex- 
posing the whole interior, with its occupants squatted in 
•the corners or on the broad platform where their trades are 
followed. They are scarce larger than boxes in the theatre, 
and the roof projects into the middle of the street, meeting 
that of the opposite neighbour, so that the pavement between 
is always dark and cool. The three or four Turkish towns 
I have seen have the appearance of cabins thrown up hastily 
after a fire. You would not suppose they were intended to 
last more than a month at the farthest. 

We roved through the narrow streets an hour or more, 
admiring the fine bearded old Turks smoking cross-legged 
in the cafes, the slipper-makers, with their gay Morocco 
wares in goodly rows around them, the wily Jews with 
their high caps and caftans, (looking, crouched among their 
merchandise, like the " venders of old bottles and abomin- 
able lies,*' as they are drawn in the plays of Queen Eliza- 
beth's time,) the muffled and gliding spectres of the Moslem 
women, and the livelier-footed Greek girls in their velvet 
jackets and braided hair, — and by this time we were kindly 
disposed to our dinners. 

On our way to the consul's, where we were to dine, we 
passed a mosque. The minaret (a tall peaked tower, about 
of the shape and proportions of a pencil-case) commanded a 
■view down the principal streets ; and a stout fellow, with 
a sharp clear voice, leaned over the balustrade at the top, 
crying out the invitation to prayer in a long drawling sing- 
song, that must have been audible on the other side of the 
Hellespont. Open porches, supported by a paling, extended 
all around the church j and the floors were filled with 
kneeling Turks, with their pistols and ataghans lying beside 
them. I had never seen so picturesque a congregation. The 
slippers were left in hundreds at the ihreshold, and the bare 
and muscular feet and legs, half concealed by the full trow- 
sers, supported as earnest a troop of worshippers as ever 






TURKISH CAMP. 239 

bent forehead to the ground. I left them rising from a 
flat prostration, and hurried after my companions to dinner. 

Our Consul of the Dardanelles is an Armenian. He is 
absent just now, in search of a runaway female slave of the 
sultan's, and his wife, a gracious Italian, full of movement 
and hospitality, does the honours of his house in his absence. 
He is a physician as well as consul and slave-catcher ; and 
the presents of a hand-organ, a French clock, and a bronze 
standish, rather prove him to be a favourite with the 
" brother of the sun/' 

We were smoking the hookah after dinner, when an 
intelligent-looking man, of fifty or so, came in to pay us a 
visit. He is at present an exile from Constantinople, by- 
order of the Grand Seignor, because a brother physician, 
his friend, failed in an attempt to cure one of the favourites 
of the imperial harem ! This is what might be called 
"sympathy upon compulsion." It is unnecessary, one would 
think, to make friendship more dangerous than common 
human treachery renders it already. 



LETTER XVIII. 

TURKISH MILITARY LIFE A VISIT TO THE CAMP — TURKISH MUSIC 

SUNSETS — THE SEA OF MARMORA. 

Oct. 1853. 

A half hour's walk brought us within sight of the 
pasha's camp. The green and white tents of five thousand 
Turkish troops were pitched on the edge of a stream, partly 
sheltered by a grove of noble oaks, and defended by wicker 
batteries at distances of thirty or forty feet. We were 
stopped by the sentinel on guard, while a messenger was 
sent in to the pasha for permission to wait upon him. 
Meantime a number of voung; officers came out from their 
tents, and commenced examining our dresses with the curi- 
osity of boys. One put on my gloves, another examined 
the cloth of my coat, a third took from me a curious stick I 
had purchased at Vienna, and a more familiar gentleman 
tccK up my hand, and, after comparing it with his own 



240 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

Hack fingers, stroked it with an approving smile, that was 
meant probably as a compliment. My companions under- 
went the same review, and their curiosity was still unsated 
when a good-looking officer, with his cimeter under his 
arm, came to conduct us to the commander-in-chief. 

The long lines of tents were bent to the direction 'of the 
stream, and, at short distances, the silken banner stuck in 
the ground under the charge of a sentinel, and a divan 
covered with rich carpets under the shade of the nearest 
tree, marked the tent of an officer. The interior of those 
of the soldiers exhibited merely a stand of muskets and a 
raised platform for bed and table, covered with coarse mats, 
and decked with the European accoutrements now common 
in Turkey. It was the middle of the afternoon, and most 
of the officers lay asleep on low ottomans, with their tent- 
curtains undrawn, and their long chibouques beside them, 
or still at their lips. Hundreds of soldiers loitered about, 
engaged in various occupations, sweeping, driving their 
tent-stakes more firmly into the ground, cleaning arms, 
cooking, or, with their heels under them, playing silently 
at dominos. Half the camp lay on the opposite side of the 
stream, and there was repeated the same warlike picture, 
the white uniform and the loose red cap, with its gold 
bullion and blue tassel, appearing and disappearing between 
the rows of tents, and the bright red banners clinging to 
the staff in the breathless sunshine. 

We soon approached the splendid pavilion of the pasha, 
unlike the rest in shape, and surrounded by a quantity of 
servants, some cooking at the root of a tree, and all pur- 
suing their vocation with singular earnestness. A superb 
banner of bright crimson silk, wrought with long lines of 
Turkish characters, probably passages from the Koran, stood 
in a raised socket, guarded by two sentinels. Near the 
tent, and not far from the edge of the stream, stood a gaily- 
painted kiosk, not unlike the fantastic summer-houses some- 
times seen in a European garden; and here our conductor 
stopped, and, kicking off his slippers, motioned for us to 
enter. 

We mounted the steps, and, passing a small entrance- 
room filled with guards, stood in the presence of the com- 
mander-in-chief. He sat on a divan, oross-legged, in a 



PASHA OF THE ARMY. 241 

military frock-coat, wrought with gold on the collar and 
cuffs, a sparkling diamond crescent on his breast, and a 
cimeter at his side, with a belt richly wrought, and held by 
a buckle of dazzling brilliants. His Aid sat beside him, in 
a dress somewhat similar, and both appeared to be men of 
about forty. The pasha is a stern, dark, soldier-like man, 
with a thick straight beard as black as jet, and features 
which look incapable of a smile. He bowed without rising 
when we entered, and motioned for us to be seated. A 
little conversation passed between him and the consul's son, 
who acted as our interpreter, and coffee came in almost 
immediately. There was an aroma about it which might 
revive a mummy. The small china cups, with thin gold 
filligree sockets, were soon emptied and taken away, and 
the officer in waiting introduced a soldier to go through the 
manual exercise, by way of amusing us. 

He was a powerful fellow, and threw his musket about 
with so much violence, that I feared every moment the 
stock, lock, and barrel, would part company. He had taken 
off his shoes before venturing into the presence of his com- 
mander, and looked oddly enough playing the soldier in his 
stockings. I was relieved of considerable apprehension when 
he ordered arms, and backed out to his slippers. 

The next exhibition was that of a military band. A drum- 
major, with a proper -gold-headed stick, wheeled some sixty 
fellows, with all kinds of instruments, under the windows 
of the kiosk, and with a whirl of his baton the harmony 
commenced. I could just detect some resemblance to a 
march. The drums rolled, the " ear-piercing fifes " fulfilled 
their destiny, and trombone, serpent, and horn showed of 
what they were capable. The pasha got upon his knees to 
lean out of the window ; and, as I rose from my low seat 
at the same time, he pulled me down beside him, and gave 
me half his carpet, patting me on the back, and pressing rue 
to the window with his arm over my neck. I have observed 
frequently among the Turks this singular familiarity of 
manners both to strangers and one another. It is an odd 
contrast to their habitual gravity. 

The sultan (I think unwisely) has introduced the Euro- 
pean uniform into his army. With the exception of the 
lumsian cap, which is substituted for the thick and hand- 

R 



242 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

some turban, the dress is such as is worn by the soldiers of 
the French army. Their tailors are of course bad, and their 
figures, accustomed only to the loose and graceful costume 
of the East, are awkward and constrained. I never saw so 
uncouth a set of fellows as the five thousand mussulmans in 
this army of the Dardanelles ; and yet, in their Turkish 
trowsers and turban, with the belt stuck full of arms, and 
their long moustache, they would be as martial-looking 
troops as ever followed a banner. 

We embarked at sunset to return to the ship. The shell- 
shaped caique, with her tall sharp extremities and fantastic 
sail, yielded to the rapid current of the Hellespont ; and 
our two boatmen, as handsome a brace of Turks as ever 
w T ere drawn in a picture, pulled their legs under them more 
closely, and commenced singing the alternate stanzas of a 
villanous duet. The helmsman's part was rather humorous, 
and his merry black eyes redeemed it somewhat ; but his 
fellow was as grave as a dervish, and howled as if he were 
ferrying over Xerxes after his defeat at the Dardanelles. 

If I were to live in the East as long as the wandering 
Jew, I think these heavenly sunsets, evening after evening, 
scarce varying by a shade, would never become familiar to 
my eye. They surprise me day after day, like some new 
and brilliant phenomenon, though the thoughts which they 
bring, as it were by a habit contracted of the hour, are almost 
always the same. The day, in these countries, where life 
flows so thickly, is engrossed, and pretty busily, too, by the 
present. The past comes up with the twilight ; and wherever 
I may be, and in whatever scene mingling, my heart breaks 
away, and goes down into the west with the sun. I am 
at home as duly as the bird settles to her nest. 

It was natural in paying the boatman, after such a musing 
passage, to remember the poetical justice of Uhland, in 
crossing the ferry : 

" Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee 

Take ! I give it willingly ! 
For, invisibly to thee, 

Spirits twain have cross'd with me ? m 

I should have paid for one other seat, at least, by til* 
fanciful tariff". Our unmusical mussulmans were concent, 






LAMPSACUS. 245 



however ; and we left them to pull back against the tide, 
by a star that cast a shadow like a meteor. 



The moon changed this morning, and the wind, that in 
this clime of fable is as constant to her as Endymion, 
changed too. The white caps vanished from the hurrying 
waves of the Dardanelles, and, after an hour or two of 
calm, the long-expected breeze came tripping out of Asia 
with Oriental softness, and is now leading us gently up 
the Hellespont. 

As we passed between the two castles of the Dardanelles, 
the commodore saluted the pasha, with nineteen guns, and 
in half an hour we were off Abydos, where our friend from 
the south has deserted us, and we are compelled to anchor. 
It would be unclassical to complain of delay on so poetical 
a spot. It is beautiful, too. The shores on both the 
Asian and European sides are charmingly varied, and the 
sun lies on them, and on the calm strait that links them, 
with a beauty worthy of the fair spirit of Hero. A small 
Turkish castle occupies the site of the " torch-lit tower " of 
Abydos, and there is a corresponding one at Sestos. The 
distance between looks little more than a mile — not a sur- 
prising feat for any swimmer, I should think. The current 
of the Hellespont remains the same, and so does the moral 
of Leander's story. The Hellespont of matrimony may be 
crossed with the tide. The deuce is to get back. 

Lampsacus on the starboard-bow — and a fairer spot lies 
on no river's brink. Its trees, vineyards, and cottages, slant 
up almost imperceptibly from the water's edge, and the hills 
around have the look u of a clean and quiet privacy," with 
a rural elegance that might tempt Shakspeare's Jaques to 
come and moralize. By the way, there have been philoso- 
phers here. Did not Alexander forgive the city its obstinate 
defence for the sake of Anaximenes ? There was a sad dog 
of a deity worshipped here about that time. 

I take a fresh look at it from the port, as I write. Pas- 
tures, every one with a bordering of tall trees, cattle as 
beautiful as the daughter of Inachus, lanes of wild shrub- 
bery, a greener stripe through the fields, like the track of a 
stream, and smoke curling from verv cluster of trees, 

B 2 



"244 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

telling, as plainly as the fancy can read, that there is both 
poetry and pillaw at Lampsacus. 

Just opposite stands the modern Gallipoli, a Turkish 
town of some thirty thousand inhabitants, at the head of 
the Hellespont. The Hellespont gets broader here; and a 
few miles further up we open into the sea of Marmora. A 
French brig-of-war, that has been hanging about us for a 
fortnight, (watching our movements in this unusual cruise 
for an American frigate, perhaps,) is just ahead, and a 
•quantity of smaller sail are stretching off on the southern 
tack, to make the best use of their new sea-room for beating 
up to Constantinople. 

We hope to see Seraglio Point to-morrow. Mr. Hodgson, 
the secretary of our embassy to Turkey, has just come on- 
board from the Smyrna packet, and the agreeable prepara- 
tions for going ashore are already on the stir. I do not find 
that the edge of curiosity dulls with use. The prospect of 
seeing a strange city to-morrow produces the same quick- 
pulsed emotion that I felt in the Diligence two years ago, 
rattling over the last post to Paris. The entrances to 
Florence, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Athens, are marked each 
with as white a stone. He may "gather no moss" who 
rolls about the world; but that which the gold of the 
careful cannot buy — pleasure -- when the soul is most 
athirst for it, grows under his feet. Of the many daily 
reasons I find to thank Providence, not the least is that of 
being what Ciodio calls himself in the play — le a here-and- 
thereian" 






LETTER XIX. 

CONSTANTINOPLE — AN ADVENTURE WITH THE DOGS OF STAMBOCJL 
THE SULTAN'S KIOSK THE BAZAARS GEORGIANS — SWEET- 
MEATS — HINDOOSTANEE FAKEERS TURKISH WOMEN AND THEIR 

EYES THE JEWS A TOKEN OF HOME THE DRUG-BAZAAR 

OPIUM-EATERS. 

Oct. 1835. 

The invariable si Where am I ? " with which a traveller 
*• vaiues at morning, was to me never more agreeably 



DOGS OF STAMBOUL. 245 

answered — At Constantinople ! The early ship-of-war sum* 
mons to " turn out " was obeyed with alacrity, and with 
the first boat after breakfast I was set ashore at Tophana, 
the landing-place of the Frank quarter of Stamboul. 

A row of low-built cafes, with a latticed enclosure and a 
plentiful shade of plane trees on the right ; a large square, 
in the centre of which stood a magnificent Persian fountain, 
as large as a church, covered with lapis-lazuli and gold, and 
endless inscriptions in Turkish ; a mosque buried in cy- 
presses on the left ; a hundred indolent-looking, large- 
trowsered, mustachoed, and withal very handsome men, 
and twice the number of snarling, wolfish, and half- starved 
dogs, are some of the objects which the first glance, as I 
stepped on shore, left on my memory. 

I had heard that the dogs of Constantinople knew and 
hated a Christian. By the time I had reached the middle 
of the square, a wretched puppy at my heels had succeeded 
in announcing the presence of a stranger. They were upon 
me in a moment from every heap of garbage and every hole 
and corner. I was beginning to be seriously alarmed, 
standing perfectly still, with at least a hundred infuriated 
dogs barking in a circle around me, when an old Turk, 
selling sherbet under the shelter of the projecting roof of 
the Persian fountain, came kindly to my relief. A stone or 
two well aimed, and a peculiar cry, which I have since 
tried in vain to imitate, dispersed the hungry wretches, and 
I took a glass of the old man's raisin-water, and pursued 
my way up the street. The circumstance, however, had 
discoloured my anticipations ; nothing looked agreeably to 
me for an hour after it. 

I ascended through narrow and steep lanes, between, 
rows of small wooden houses, miserably built and painted, 
to the main street of the quarter of Pera. Here live all 
Christians and Christian ambassadors, and here I found our 

secretary of legation, Mr. H , who kindly offered to 

accompany me to old Stamboul. 

We descended to the water-side, and, stepping into an 
egg-shell caique, crossed the Golden Horn, and landed on 
a pier between the sultan's green kiosk and the seraglio. I 
was fortunate in a companion who knew the people and 
spoke the language. The red-trowsered and armed ker^s, 



^t4tb PENCILLJXGS BY THE WAY. 

at the door of the kiosk, took his pipe from his mouth, after 
a bribe and a little persuasion, and motioned to a boy to 
show us the interior. A circular room, with a throne ot 
solid silver embraced in a double colonnade of marble pillars, 
and covered with a roof laced with lapis-Iazuli and gold, 
foruied the place from which Sultan Mahmoud formerly- 
contemplated on certain days the busy and beautiful pano- 
rama of his matchless bay. The kiosk is on the edge of 
the water, and the poorest caikjee might row his little bark 
under its threshold, and fill his monarch's eye, and look on. 
his monarch's face with the proudest. The green canvas 
curtains, which envelope the whole building, have, for a 
long time, been unraised ; and Mahmoud is oftener to be 
seen on horseback, in the dress of a European officer, 
guarded by troops in European costume and array. The 
change is said to be dangerously unpopular. 

We walked on to the square of Sultana Valide. Its large 
area was crowded with the buyers and sellers of a travelling 
fair — a sort of Jews* market held on different days in dif- 
ferent parts of this vast capital. In Turkey, every nation 
is distinguished by its dress, and almost as certainly by its 
branch of trade. On the right of the gate, under a huge 
plane-tree, shedding its yellow leaves among the various 
wares, stood the booths of a group of Georgians, their round 
and rosy-dark faces (you would know their sisters must be 
half houris) set off with a tall black cap of curling wool, 
their small shoulders with a tight jacket studded with silk 
buttons, and their waists with a voluminous silken sash, 
whose fringed ends fell over their heels as they sat cross- 
legged, patiently waiting for custom. Hardware is the 
staple of their shops, but the cross-pole in front is fantasti- 
cally hung with silken garters and tasselled cords ; and 
their own Georgian caps, with a gay crown of Cashmere, 
enrich and diversify the shelves. I bought a pair or two 
of blushing silk garters of a young man, whose eyes and 
teeth should have been a woman's, and we strolled on to 
the next booth. 

Here was a Turk, with a table covered by a broad brass 
tray, on which was displayed a tempting array of mucilage, 
white and pink, something of the consistency of blanc- 
mange. A dish of sugar, small gilded saucers, and long- 



FAKEERS. 247 

handled, flat, brass spoons, with a vase of rose-water, com- 
pleted his establishment. The grave mussulman cut, 
sugared, and scented the portions for which we asked, 
without condescending to look at us, or open his lips ; and, 
with a glass of mild and pleasant sherbet from his next 
neighbour, as immovable a Turk as himself, we had lunched, 
extremely to my taste, for just five cents American cur- 
rency. 

A little farther on I was struck with the appearance of 
two men, who stood bargaining with a Jew. My friend 
knew them immediately as fakeers, or religious devotees, 
from Hindoostan. He addressed them in Arabic, and, 
during their conversation of ten minutes, I studied them 
with some curiosity. They were singularly small, without 
any appearance of dwarfishness, their limbs and persons 
slight, and very equally and gracefully proportioned. Their 
features were absolutely regular, and, though small as a 
child's of ten or twelve years, were perfectly developed. 
They appeared like men seen through an inverted opera- 
glass. An exceedingly ashy, olive complexion, hair of a 
kind of glitte ing black, quite unlike in texture and colour 
any I have ever before seen ; large, brilliant, intense black 
eyes, and lips, (the most peculiar feature of all) of lustreless 
blacky* completed the portraits of two as remarkable-looking 
men as I have any where met. Their costume was humble, 
but not unpicturesque. A well-worn sash of red silk enve- 
loped the waist in many folds, and sustained trowsers tight 
to the legs, but of the Turkish ampleness over the hips. 
Their small feet, which seemed dried up to the bone, were 
bare. A blanket, with a hood marked in a kind of ara- 
besque figure, covered their shoulders, and a high- quilted 
cap, with a rim of curling wool, was pressed down closely 
over the forehead. A crescent-shaped tin vessel, suspended 
by a leather strap to the waist, and serving the two pur- 
poses of a charity-box, and a receptacle for bread and vege- 
tables, seemed a kind of badge of their profession. They 
were lately from Hindoostan, and were begging their way 
still farther into Europe, They received our proffered alms 

* I have since met many of them in the streets of Constantinople ; and I find 
it is a distinguishing feature of their race. They look as if their lips were dead — 
as if the blood had dried beneath the skin. 



248 PEXCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

without any mark of surprise or even pleasure, and, laying 
their hands on their breasts, with countenances perfectly 
immovable, gave us a Hindoostanee blessing, and resumed 
their traffic. They see the world, these rovers on foot ! 
And I think, could I see it myself in no other way, I would 
e'en take sandal and scrip, and traverse it as dervish or 
beggar. 

The alleys between the booths were crowded with Turk- 
ish women, who seemed the chief purchasers. The effect 
of their enveloped persons, and eyes peering from the 
muslin folds of the yashmack, is droll to a stranger. It 
seemed to me like a masquerade ; and the singular sound of 
female voices, speaking through several thicknesses of a 
stuff, bound so close on the mouth as to show the shape of 
the lips exactly, perfected the delusion. It reminded me of 
the half-smothered tones beneath the masks in carnival-time. 
A clothes-bag with yellow slippers would have about as 
much form, and might be walked about with as much grace, 
as a Turkish woman. Their fat hands, the finger-nails 
dyed with henna, and their unexceptionably magnificent 
eyes, are all that the stranger is permitted to peruse. It ig 
strange how universal is the beauty of the Eastern eye. I 
have looked in vain hitherto for a small or an unexpressive 
one. It is quite startling to meet the gaze of such large 
liquid orbs, bent upon you from their long silken fringes, 
with the unwinking steadiness of look common to the fe- 
males of this country. Wrapped in their veils, they seem 
unconscious of attracting attention, and turn and look you 
full in the face, while you seek in vain for a pair of lips to 
explain by their expression the meaning of such particular 
notice. 

The Jew is more distinguishable at Constantinople than 
elsewhere. He is compelled to wear the dress of his tribe, 
(and its " badge of sufferance,'' too,) and you will find him 
wherever there is trafficking to be done, in a small cap, 
not ungracefully shaped, twisted about with a peculiar 
handkerchief of a small black print, and set back so as to 
show the whole of his national high and narrow forehead. 
He is always good-humoured and obsequious, and receives 
the curse with which his officious offers of service are often 
repelled with a smile, and a hope that he may serve you 






DRUG BAZAAR. 249 

another time. One of them, as we passed his booth, called 
our attention to some newly-opened bales hearing the stamp, 
"tremont mill, lowell, mass." It was a long distance 
from home to meet such familiar words ! 

We left the square of the sultan mother, and entered a 
street of confectioners. The East is famous for its sweet- 
meats, and truly a more tempting array never visited the 
Christmas dream of a school-boy. Even Felix, the patissier 
nonpareil of Paris, might take a lesson in jellies. And 
then for " candy" of all colours of the rainbow, (not shut 
enviously in with pitiful glass cases, but piled up to the 
ceiling in a shop all in the street, as it might be in Utopia, 
with nothing to pay,) — it is like a scene in the Arabian 
Nights. The last part of the parenthesis is almost true, 
for with a small coin of the value of two American cents, 
I bought of a certain kind called in Turkish "peace to your 
throat" (they call things by such poetical names in the 
East) the quarter of which I could not have eaten, even in 
my best ei days of sugar-candy." The women of Constanti- 
nople, I am told, almost live on confectionary. They eat 
incredible quantities. The sultan's eight hundred wives 
and women employ five hundred cooks, and consume two 
thousand Jive hundred pounds of sugar daily ! It is pro- 
bably the most expensive item of the seraglio kitchen. 

A turn or two brought us to the entrance of a long dark 
passage, of about the architecture of a covered bridge in our 
country. A place richer in the Oriental and picturesque 
could scarce be found between the Danube and the Nile. 
It is the bazaar of drugs. As your eye becomes accustomed 
to the light, you distinguish vessels of every size and shape, 
ranged along the receding shelves of a stall, and filled to 
the uncovered brim with the various productions of the 
Orient. The edges of the baskets and jars are turned over 
with rich coloured papers, (a peculiar colour to every drug,) 
and broad spoons of boxwood are crossed on the top. There 
is the henna in a powder of deep brown, with an envelope 
of deep Tyrian purple, and all the precious gums in their 
jars, golden-leafed, and spices and dyes and medicinal roots ; 
and above hang anatomies of curious monsters, dried and 
stuffed, and in the midst of all, motionless as the box of 
sulphur beside him, and almost as yellow, sits a venerable 



250 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

Turk, with his heard on his knees, and his pipe-howl 
thrust away over his drugs, its ascending smoke-curls his 
only sign of life. This class of merchants is famous for 
opium-eaters, and if you pass at the right hour, you find 
the large eye of the silent smoker dilated and wandering, 
his fingers busy in tremulously counting his spige-wood 
heads, and the roof of his stall wreathed with clouds of 
smoke, the vent to every species of Eastern enthusiasm. If 
you address him, he smiles, and puts his hand to his fore- 
head and breast, but condescends to answer no question till 
•it is thrice reiterated ; and then in the briefest word pos- 
sible, he answers wide of your meaning, strokes the smoke 
out of his moustache, and, slipping the costly amber between 
his lips, abandons himself again to his exalted reverie. 

I write this after being a week at Constantinople, during 
which the Egyptian bazaar has been my frequent and most 
fancy- stirring lounge. Of its forty merchants, there is not 
one whose picturesque features are not imprinted deeply in 
my memory. I have idled up and down in the dim light, 
and fingered the soft henna, and bought small parcels of 
incense-wood for my pastille lamp, studying the remarkable 
faces of the unconscious old mussulmans, till my mind be- 
came somehow tinctured of the East, and (what will be 
better understood) my clothes steeped in the mixed and 
agreeable odours of the thousand spices. Where are the 
painters that they have never found this mine of admirable 
studies ? There is not a corner of Constantinople, nor a 
man in the streets, that were not a novel and a capital 
subject for the pencil. Pray, Mr. Cole, leave things that 
have been painted so often, as aqueducts and Italian ruins, 
(though you do make delicious pictures, and could never 
waste time or pencils on any thing,) and come to the East 
for one single book of sketches ! How I have wished I 
was a painter since I have been here. 



i 



BOSPHORUS. 25* 



LETTER XX. 



THE BOSPHORUS TURKISH TALACES — THE BLACK SEA 

BUyUKOERE. 

OCT. 1833. 

We left the ship with two caiques, each pulled by three 
men, and carrying three persons, on an excursion to the 
Black Sea. We were followed by the captain in his fast- 
pulling gig with six oars, who proposed to beat the feathery 
boats of the country in a twenty miles' pull against the 
tremendous current of the Bosphorus. 

The day was made for us. We coiled ourselves d la 
Turque, in the bottom of the sharp caique; and as our 
broad-breasted pagans, after the first mile, took off their 
shawled turbans, unwound their Cashmere girdles, laid 
aside their gold broidered jackets, and with nothing but the 
flowing silk shirt and ample trowsers to embarrass their 
action, commenced " giving way " in long, energetic strokes 
— I say, just then, with the sunshine and the west wind 
attempered to half a degree warmer than the blood, (which 
I take to be the perfection of temperature,) and a long, 
autumn day, or two, or three before us, and not a thought 
in the company that was not kindly and joyous — just then, 
I say, I dropped a ie white stone " on the hour, and said, 
<f Here is a moment, old Care, that has slipped through 
your rusty fingers ! You have pinched me the past some- 
what, and you will doubtless mark your cross on the future 
— but the present, by a thousand pulses in this warm frame 
laid along in the sunshine, is care-free, and the last hour of 
Eden came not on a softer pinion !" 

We shot along through the sultan's fleet (some eighteen 
or twenty lofty ships of war, looking, as they lie at anchor 
in this narrow strait, of a supernatural size) and then, 
nearing the European shore to take advantage of the counter- 
current, my kind friend, Mr. H , who is at home on 

these beautiful waters, began to name to me the palaces 
we were shooting by, with many a little history of their 
occupants between, to which in a letter, written with a tra- 



252 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

veller's haste, and in moments stolen from fatigue or 
pleasure or sleep, I could not pretend to do justice. 

The Bosphorus is quite — there can be no manner of 
doubt of it — the most singularly beautiful scenery in the 
world. From Constantinople to the Black Sea, a distance 
of twenty miles, the two shores of Asia and Europe, sepa- 
rated by but half a mile of bright blue water, are lined by 
lovely villages, each with its splendid palace or two, its 
mosque and minarets, and its hundred small houses buried 
hi trees ; each with its small dark cemetery of cypresses 
and turbaned head-stones, and each with its valley stretching 
back into the hills, of which every summit and swell is 
crowned with a fairy kiosk. There is no tide, and the 
palaces of the sultan and his ministers, and of the wealthier 
Turks and Armenians, are built half over the water, and 
the ascending caique shoots beneath his window, within the 
length of the owner's pipe ; and with his own slender boat 
lying under the stairs, the luxurious Oriental makes but a 
step from the cushions of his saloon to those of a conveyance, 
which bears him (so built on the water's edge in this mag- 
nificent capital) to almost every spot that can require his 
presence. 

A beautiful palace is that of the ci Marble Cradle/' or 
Beshiktash, the sultan's winter residence. Its bright 
gardens with latticed fences (through which, as we almost 
touched in passing, we saw the gleam of the golden orange 
and lemon trees, and the thousand flowers, and heard the 
plash of fountains and the singing of birds,) lean down to 
the lip of the Bosphorus, and declining to the south, and 
protected from every thing but the sun by an inclosing 
wall, enjoy, like the terrace of old king Renne, a perpetual 
summer. The brazen gates open on the water, and the 
palace itself, a beautiful building, painted in the Oriental 
style of a bright pink, stands between the gardens, with its 
back to the wall. The summer palace, where the " un- 
muzzled lion," as his flatterers call him, resides at present, is 
just above on the Asian side, at a village called Beylerbey. 
It is an immense building, painted yellow, with white 
cornices, and has an extensive terrace garden rising over the 
hill behind. The harem has eight projecting wings, each 
occupied by one of the sultan's lawfrl wives. 



PALACES Otf THE BOSPHORUS. 



253 



Six or seven miles from Constantinople, on the European 
shore, stands the serai of the sultan's eldest sister. It is a 
Chinese-looking structure, but exceedingly picturesque, and 
like every thing else on the Bosphorus, quite in keeping 
with the scene. There is not a building on either side, 
from the Black Sea to Marmora, that would not be ridicu- 
lous in other countries ; and yet, here, their gingerbread 
balconies, imitation perspectives, lattices, bird-cages, and 
kiosks, seem as naturally the growth of the climate as the 
pomegranate and the cypress. The old maid sultana lives 
here with a hundred or two female slaves of condition, a 
little empress in an empire sufficiently large (for a woman) 
seeing no bearded face (it is presumed) except her black 
eunuchs and her European physician, and having though a 
sultan's sister, less liberty than she gives even her slaves, 
whom she permits to marry if they will. She can neither 
read nor write, and is said to be fat, indolent, kind, and 
childish. 

A little farther up, the sultan is repairing a fantastical 
little palace for his youngest sister, Esmeh Sultana, who is 
to be married to Haleil Pasha, the commander of the ar- 
tillery. She is about twenty, and, report says, handsome 
and spirited. Her betrothed was a Georgian slave, bought 
by the sultan when a boy, and advanced by the usual steps 
of favouritism. By the laws of imperial marriages in this 
empire, he is to be banished to a distant pashalik after 
living with his wife a year, his connexion with blood-royal 
making him dangerously eligible to the throne. His bride 
remains at Stamboul, takes care of her child, (if she has 
one) and lives the remainder of her life in a widow's seclu- 
sion, with an allowance proportioned to her rank. His 
consolation is provided for by the mussulman privilege of 
as many more waves as he can support. Heaven send him 
resignation — if he needs it notwithstanding. 

The hakim, or chief physician to the sultan, has a hand- 
some palace on the same side of the Bosphorus; and the 
Armenian serafFs, or bankers, though compelled, like all 
rayahs, to paint their houses of a dull lead colour, (only a 
mussulman may live in a red house in Constantinople,) are 
said, in those dusky-looking tenements, to maintain a luxury 
not inferior to that of the sultan himself. They have ? 



U54 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

singular effect, those black, funereal houses, standing in the 
foreground of a picture of such light and beauty ! 

We pass Orta-keui, the Jew village, and Arna-out-keui, 
occupied mostly by Greeks; and here if you have read 
"the Armenians," you are in the midst of its most, stirring 
scenes. The story is a true one, not much embellished in 
the hands of the novelist ; and there, on the hill opposite, in 
Anatolia, stands the house of the heroine's father, the old 
scraff, Oglou, and, behind the garden, you may see the small 
' cottage, inhabited, secretly, by the enamoured Constantine ; 
and here, in the pretty village of Bebec, lives, at this 
moment, the widowed and disconsolate Veronica, dressed 
ever in weeds, and obstinately refusing all society but her 
own sad remembrances. I must try to see her. Her 
" husband of a night " was compelled to marry again by the 
hospodar, his father, (but this is not in the novel, you will 
remember) and there is late news that his wife is dead, 
and the lovers of romance in Stamboul are hoping he will 
Teturn and make a happier sequel than the sad one in the 
story. The " orthodox catholic Armenian, broker and 
money-changer to boot," who was to have been her forced 
husband is a very amiable and good-looking fellow, now in 
the employ of our charge d* affaires as second dragoman. 

We approach Roumeli-Hissar, a jutting point almost 
meeting a similar projection from the Asian shore, crowned 
like its vis-a-vis, with a formidable battery. The Bos- 
phorus here is but half an arrow flight in width, and Europe 
and Asia, here at their nearest approach, stand looking 
each other in the face, like boxers, with foot forward, fist 
doubled, and a most formidable row of teeth on either side. 
The current scampers through between the two castles, as 
if happy to get out of the way, and up-stream, it is hard- 
pulling for a caique. They are beautiful points, however, 
and I am ashamed of my coarse simile, when I remember how 
green was the foliage that half enveloped the walls, and 
how richly picturesque the hills behind them. Here in the 
European Castle, were executed the greater part of the 
janizaries, hundreds in a day, of the manliest frames in the 
empire, thrown into the rapid Bosphorus, headless and 
stripped, to float, unmourned and unregarded to the sea. 

Above Roumeli-Hissar 7 the Bosphorus spreads again, and 



THE BLACK SEA. 255 



a curving bay, which is set like a mirror, in a frame of the 
softest foliage and verdure, is pointed out as a spot at which 
the crusaders, Godfrey of Bouillon and Raymond of 
Toulouse encamped on their way to Palestine. The hills 
beyond this are loftier; and the Giant's mountain, upon 
which the Russian army encamped at their late visit to the 
Porte, would be a respectable eminence in any country. 
At its foot, the strait expands into quite a lake, and on the 
European side, in a scoop of the shore, exquisitely placed, 
stand the diplomatic villages of Terapia and Buyukdere. 
The English, French, Russian, Austrian, and other flags 
were flying over a half dozen of the most desirable residences 
I have seen since Italy. 

We soon pulled the remaining mile or two, and our spent 
caikjees drew breath, and lay on their oars in the Black 
Sea. The waves were breaking on the " blue Symplegades," 
a mile on our left, and, before us, toward the Cimmerian 
Bosphorus, and, south, toward Colchis and Trebizond 
spread one broad, blue waste of waters, apparently as limit- 
less as the ocean. The Black Sea is particularly blue. 

We turned our prow to the west, and I sighed to re- 
member that I had reached my farthest step into the east. 
Henceforth 1 shall be on the return. I sent a long look 
over the waters to the bright lands beyond, so famed in 
history and fiction, and, wishing for even a metamorphosis 
into the poor sea-bird flying above us, (whose travelling 
expenses Nature pays,) I lay back in the boat with a 
"change in the spirit of my dream." 

We stopped on the Anatolian shore to visit the ruins of a 
fine old Genoese castle, which looks over the Black Sea, and 
after a lunch upon grapes and coffee, at a small village at 
the foot of the hill on which k stands, we embarked and 
followed our companions. Running down with the current 
to Buyukdere, we landed and walked along the thronged 
and beautiful shore to Terapia, meeting hundreds of fair 
Armenians and Greeks, (all beautiful, it seemed to me) 
issuing forth for their evening promenade;, and, with a call 
of ceremony on the English ambassador, for whom I had 
letters, we again took to the caique, and fled down with the 
current like a bird. Oh, what a sunset was there I 

We were to dine and pass the night at the country-house 



$56 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAT. 

of an English Gentleman at Bebec, a secluded and lovely 
village, six or eight miles from Constantinople. We reached 
the landing as the stars began to glimmer, and, after one of 
the most agreeable and hospitable entertainments I re- 
member to have shared, we took an early breakfast with 
our joyous host, and returned to the ship. I could wish 
my friends no brighter passage in their lives than such an 
excursion as mine to the Black Sea. 



LETTER XXI. 






FOR PURCHASERS EXQUISITE FLAVOUR OF THE TURKISH PER- 
FUMES — THE SLAVE-MARKET OF CONSTANTINOPLE SLAVES FROM 

VARIOUS COUNTRIES, GREEK, CIRCASSIAN, EGYPTIAN, PERSIAN 

AFRICAN FEMALE SLAVES AN IMPROVISATRICE EXPOSURE 

FOR SALE, &C. &C. 

Oct. 1833. 

An Abyssinian slave with bracelets on his wrists and ankles; 
a white turban, folded in the most approved fashion around 
his curly head, and a showy silk sash about his waist, ad- 
dressed us in broken English as we passed a small shop on 
the way to the Bezestein. His master was an old acquaint- 
ance of my polyglot friend, and, passing in at a side-door, 
we entered a dimly-lighted apartment in the rear, and 
were received with a profusion of salaams by the sultan's 
perfumer. For a Turk, Mustapha EfFendi was the most 
voluble gentleman in his discourse that I had yet met in 
Stamboul. A spare grey beard just sprinkled a pair of 
blown-up cheeks, and a collapsed double chin that fell in 
curtain folds to his bosom, a moustache, of seven or eight 
hairs on a side, curled demurely about the corners of his 
mouth, his heavy, oily black eyes twinkled in their pursy 
recesses, with the salacious good-humour of a satyr ; and, 
as he coiled his legs under him on the broad ottoman in the 
corner, his boneless body completely lapped over them, knees 
and all, and left him, apparently, bolt upright on his trunk, 
like a man amputated at the hips. A string of beads in 



MUSTAPHA. 257 

one hand, and a splendid narghile, or rose-water pipe, in 
the other, completed as fine a picture of a mere animal as I 
remember to have met in my travels. 

My learned friend pursued the conversation in Turkish, 
And, in a few minutes, the black entered with pipes of ex- 
quisite amber filled with the mild Persian tobacco. Leaving 
his slippers at the door, he dropped upon his knee, and 
placed two small brass dishes in the centre of the room to 
receive the hot pipe-bowls, and, with a showy flourish of 
his long naked arm, brought round the rich mouth-pieces to 
our lips. A spicy atom of some aromatic composition, laid 
in the centre of the bowl, removed from the smoke all that 
could offend the most delicate organs, and, as I looked about 
the perfumer's retired sanctum and my eye rested on the 
small heaps of spice-wood, the gilded pastilles, the curious 
bottles of ottar of roses and jasmine, and thence to the broad, 
soft divans extending quite around the room, piled in the 
corners with cushions of down, I thought Mustapha the 
perfumer, among those who lived by traffic, had the clean- 
liest and most gentleman-like vocation. 

Observing that I smoked but little, Mustapha gave an 
order to his familiar, who soon appeared with two small 
gilded saucers; one containing a jelly of incomparable deli- 
cacy and whiteness, and the other a candied liquid, tinctured 
with quince and cinnamon. My friend explained to me 
that 1 was to eat both, and that Mustapha said, <c on his 
head be the injury it would do me." There needed little 
persuasion. The cook to a court of fairies might have 
mingled sweets less delicately. 

For all this courtesy Mustapha finds his offset in the 
opened hearts of his customers, when the pipes are smoked 
out, and there is nothing to delay the offer of his costly 
wares. First calling for a jar of jessamine, than which the 
sultan himself perfumes his beard with no rarer, he turned 
it upside down, and, leaning towards me, rubbed the 
moistened cork over my nascent moustache, and waited with 
a satisfied certainty for my expression of admiration as it 
w ascended me into the brain." There was no denying that 
it was of celestial flavour. He held up his fingers : " one ? 
two? three? ten? How many bottles shall your slave fill 
; for you ? " It was a most lucid uantomime. An interpreter 

s 



258 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY, 

would have been superfluous. The ottar of roses stood next 
on the shelf. It was the best ever sent from Adrianople. 
Bottle after bottle of different extracts was passed under 
nasal review ; each, one might think, the triumph of the 
alchemy of flowers, and of each a specimen was laid aside 
for me in a slender phial, dexterously capped with, vellum, 
and tied with a silken thread by the adroit Abyssinian. 
I escaped emptying my purse by a single worthless coin 
the fee I required for my return boat over the Golden Horn 
— but I had seen Mustapha the perfumer. 

M.v friend led the wav through several intricate windings 
and, passing through a gateway, we entered a circular area, 
surrounded with a single building divided into small apart 
ments, faced with open porches. It was the slave-market 
of Constantinople. My first idea was to look round for 
Don Juan and Johnson. In their place we found slaves of 
almost every Eastern nation, who looked at us with an " I 
wish to heaven that somebody would buy us " sort of an 
expression, but none so handsome as Haidee's lover. In a 
low cellar, beneath one of the apartments, lay twenty or 
thirty white men chained together by the legs, and with 
scarce the clothing required by decency. A small- featured 
Arab stood at the door, wrapped in a purple-hooded cloak, 
and Mr. H., addressing him in Arabic, inquired their nations. 
He was not their master, but the stout fellow in the corner, 
he said, was a Greek by his regular features, and the boy 
chained to him was a Circassian by his rosy cheek and curly 
hair, and the black-lipped villain with the scar over his 
forehead was an Egyptian, doubtless, and the two that 
looked like brothers were Georgians or Persians, or perhaps 
Bulgarians. Poor devils ! they lay on the clay floor with 
a cold easterly wind blowing in upon them, dispirited and 
chilled, with the prospect of being sold to a task-master for 
their best hope of relief. 

A shout of African laughter drew us to the other side of 
the bazaar. A dozen Nubian damsels, flat- nosed and curly- 
headed, but as straight and fine-limbed as pieces of black 
statuary, lay around on a platform in front of their apart- 
ment, while one sat upright in the middle, and amused her 
companions by some narration accompanied by grimaces 
irresistibly ludicrous. Each had a somewhat scant blanket, 



SLAVE-MARKET. 259 

black with dirt, and worn as carelessly as a lady carries her 
shawl. Their black, polished frames were disposed about, 
in postures a painter would scarce call ungraceful, and no 
start or change of attitude when we approached betrayed 
the innate coyness of the sex. After watching the impro~ 
visatrice awhile, we were about passing on, when a man 
came out from the inner apartment, and beckoning to one 
of them to follow him, walked into the middle of the 
bazaar. She was a tall, arrow- straight lass of about 
eighteen, with the form of a nymph, and the head of a 
baboon. He commenced by crying in a voice that must 
have been educated in the gallery of a minaret, setting 
forth the qualities of the animal at his back, who was to be 
sold at public auction forthwith. As he closed his harangue 
he slipped his pipe back into his mouth, and, lifting the 
scrimped blanket of the ebon Venus, turned her twice 
round, and walked to the other side of the bazaar, where 
his cry and the exposure of the submissive wench were 
repeated. 

We left him to finish his circuit, and walked on in search 
of the Circassian beauties of the market. Several turbaned 
slave-merchants were sitting round a manghal, or brass 
! vessel of coals, smoking or making their coffee, in one of 
the porticos, and my friend addressed one of them with an 
inquiry on the subject. " There were Circassians in the 
bazaar," he said, (i but there was an expressed firman, pro- 
hibiting the exposing or selling of them to Franks, under 
heavy penalties." We tried to bribe him. It was of no 
use. He pointed to the apartment in which they were, 
and, as it was upon the ground floor, I took advice of 
modest assurance, and, approaching the window, sheltered 
my eyes with my hand, and looked in. A great, fat girl, 
with a pair of saucer-like black eyes, and cheeks as red and 
round as a cabbage-rose, sat facing the window, devouring 
a pie most voraciously. She had a small carpet spread be- 
neath her, and sat on one of her heels, with a row of fat, 
red toes, whose nails were tinged with henna, just pro- 
truding on the other side from the folds of her ample 
trowsers. The light was so dim that I could not see the 
features of the others, of whom there were six or seven in 

roups in the corners. And so faded the bright colours of 
s 2 



260 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

a certain boyish dream of Circassian beauty ! A fat girl 
eating a pie ! 

As we were about leaving the bazaar, the door of a small 
apartment near the gate opened, and disclosed the common 
cheerless interior of a chamber in a khan. In the centre 
burned the almost-extinguished embers of a Turkish 
manghal, and, at the moment of my passing, a figure rose 
from a prostrate position, and exposed, as a shawl dropped 
from her face in rising, the exquisitely small features and 
bright olive skin of an Arab girl. Her hair was black as 
night, and the bright braid of it across her forehead seemed 
but another shade of the warm dark eye that lifted its 
heavy and sleepy lids, and looked out of the accidentally- 
opened door as if she were trying to remember how she had 
dropped out of te Araby the blest " upon so cheerless a spot. 
She was very beautiful. I should have taken her for a 
child, from her diminutive size, but for a certain fulness in 
the limbs and a womanly ripeness in the bust and features. 
The same dusky lips which give the males of her race 
a look of ghastliness, either by contrast with a row of 
dazzlingly white teeth, or from their round and perfect 
chiselling, seemed in her almost a beauty. 1 had looked at 
her several minutes before she chose to consider it as imper- 
tinence. At last she slowly raised her little symmetrical 
figure, (the " Barbary shape " the old poets talk of,) and, 
slipping forward to reach the latch, I observed that she was 
chained by one of her ankles to a ring in the floor. To 
think that only a " malignant and a turban'd Turk " may 
possess such a Hebe ! Beautiful creature ! your lot, 

** By some o'er-hasty angel was misplaced 
In Fate's eternal volume." 

And yet it is very possible she would eat pies, too ! 

We left the slave-market, and, wishing to buy a piece of 
Brusa silk for a dressing-gown, my friend conducted me to 
a secluded khan in the neighbourhood of the far-famed 
" burnt column." Entering by a very mean door, closed 
within by a curtain, we stood on fine Indian mats in a 
large room, piled to the ceiling with silks enveloped in the 
soft satin-naper of the East. Here again coffee must be 
handed round before a single fold of the old Armenian's 



A SILK-MERCHANT. £6l 

wares could see the light ; and fortunate it is, since one 
may not courteously refuse it, that Turkish coffee is very 
delicious, and served in acorn cups for size. A handsome 
boy took away the little filagree holders at last, and the old 
trader, setting his huge calpack firmly on his shaven head, 
began to reach down his costly wares. I had never seen 
such an array. The floor was soon like a shivered rainbow, 
almost painting the eye with the brilliancy and variety of 
beautiful fabrics. There were stuffs of gold for a queen's 

I wardrobe ; there were gauze -like fabrics inwoven w T ith 
flowers of silver ; and there was no leaf in botany, nor 
device in antiquity, that was not imitated in their rich 

; borderings, I laid my hand on a plain pattern of blue and 
silver, and, half-shutting my eyes to imagine how I should 
look in it, resolved upon the degree of depletion which my 
purse could bear, and inquired the price. As " green door 

I and brass knocker " says of his charges in the farce, it was 
' ridiculously trifling." It is a cheap country, the East ! 
A beautiful Circassian slave for a hundred dollars, (if you 
are a Turk,) and an emperor's dressing-gown for three ! 
The Armenian laid his hand on his breast, as if he had 
made a good sale of it ; the coffee-bearer wanted but a sous, 
and that was charity ; and thus, by a mere change of place, 
that which were but a ginger-bread expenditure, becomes a 
rich man's purchase. 



LETTER XXII. 



PUNISHMENT OF CONJUGAL INFIDELITY DROWNING IN THE BOS- 

PHORUS — FREQUENCY OF ITS OCCURRENCE ACCOUNTED FOR— A 
BAND OF WILD ROUMELIOTES THEIR PICTURESQUE APPEAR- 
ANCE ALI PASHA, OF YANINA A TURKISH FUNERAL FAT 

WIDOW OF SULTAN SELIM A VISIT TO THE SULTAN'S SUMMER 

PALACE A TRAVELLING MOSLEM UNEXPECTED TOKEN OF 

HOME. 

Nov, 1833. 

A Turkish woman was sacked and thrown into the Bos- 
phorus this morning. I was idling away the day in the 
bazaar and did not see her. The ward-room steward of 



26*2 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

the " United States," a very intelligent man, who was at 
the pier when she was brought down to the caique, de- 
scribes her as a young woman of twenty-two or three years, 
strikingly beautiful ; and with the exception of a short 
quick sob in her throat, as if she had wearied herself out 
with weeping, she was quite calm, and submitted com- 
posedly to her fate. She was led down by two soldiers, in 
her usual dress, her yashmack only torn from her face, and 
rowed off to the mouth of the bay, where the sack was 
drawn over her without resistance. The plash of her body 
in the sea was distinctly seen by the crowd who had fol- 
lowed her to the water. 

It is horrible to reflect on these summary executions, 
knowing as we do that the poor victim is taken before the 
judge, upon the least jealous whim of her husband or 
master, condemned often upon bare suspicion, and hurried 
instantly from the tribunal to this violent and revolting 
death. Any suspicion of commerce with a Christian par- 
ticularly, is, with or without evidence, instant ruin. Not 
long ago, the inhabitants of Arnaout-keui, a pretty village 
on the Bosphorus, were shocked with the spectacle of a 
Turkish woman and a young Greek hanging dead from the 
shutters of a window on the water-side. He had been de- 
tected in leaving her house at daybreak, and in less than an 
hour the unfortunate lovers had met their fate. They are 
said to have died most heroically, embracing and declaring 
their attachment to the last. 

Such tragedies occur every week or two in Constantinople, 
and it is not wonderful, considering the superiority of the 
educated and picturesque Greek to his brutal neighbour, or 
the daring and romance of Europeans in the pursuit of for- 
bidden pleasure. The liberty of going and coming, which 
the Turkish women enjoy, wrapped only in veils, which 
assist by their secrecy, is temptingly favourable to intrigue ; 
and the self sacrificing nature of the sex, when the heart is 
concerned, shows itself here in proportion to the demand 
for it. 

An eminent physician, who attends the seraglio of the 
sultan's sister, consisting of a great number of women, tells 
me that their time is principally occupied in sentimental 
correspondence, by means of flowers, with the forbidden 



A BAND OF WILD ROUMELIOTES. 263 

Greeks and Armenians. These Platonic passions for persons 
whom they have only seen from their gilded lattices, are 
their only amusement, and they are permitted by the 
sultana, who has herself the reputation of being partial to 
Franks, and, old as she is, ingenious in contrivances to 
obtain their society. My intelligent informant thinks the 
Turkish women, in spite of their want of education, some- 
what remarkable for their sentiment of character. 

With two English travellers, whom I had known in 
Italy, I pulled out of the bay in a caique, and ran down 
under the wall of the city, on the side of the sea of 
Marmora. For a mile or more we were beneath the wall 
of the seraglio, whose small water-gates whence so many 
victims have found 

" Their way to Marmora without a boat," 

are beset, to the imaginative eye of the traveller, with the 
dramatis persona? of a thousand tragedies. One smiles to 
detect himself gazing on an old postern, with his teeth shut 
hard together, and his hair on end, in the calm of a pure, 
silent, sunshiny morning of September ! 

We landed some seven miles below, at the Seven Towers, 
and dismissed our boat to walk across to the Golden Horn. 
Our road was outside of the triple walls of Stamboul, whose 
two hundred and fifty towers look as if they were toppling 
after an earthquake, and are overgrown superbly with ivy. 
Large trees, rooted in the crevices, and gradually bursting 
the thick walls, overshadow entirely their once proud tur- 
rets, and for the whole length of the five or six miles across, 
it is one splendid picture of decay. I have seen in no coun- 
try such beautiful ruins. 

At the Adrianople gate, we found a large troop of horse- 
men, armed in the wild manner of the East, who had ac- 
companied a Roumeliote chief from the mountains. They 
were not allowed to enter the city, and, with their horses 
picketed on the plain, were lying about in groups, waiting 
till their leader should conclude his audience with the 
seraskier. They were as cut-throat-looking a set as a 
painter would wish to see. The extreme richness of East- 
ern arms, mounted showily in silver, and of shapes so cum- 



26'4 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

Dersome, yet picturesque, contrasted strangely with their 
ragged capotes, and torn leggins, and their way-worn and 
weary countenances. Yet they were almost without excep- 
tion fine-featured, and of a resolute expression of face ; and 
they had flung themselves, as savages will, into attitudes 
that art would find it difficult to improve. 

Directly opposite this gate stand five marhle slabs, indi- 
cating the spots in which are buried the heads of All Pasha, 
of Albania, his three sons, and grandson. The inscription 
states, that the rebel lost his head for having dared to 
aspire to independence. He was a brave old barbarian, 
however, and, as the worthy chief of the most warlike 
people of modern times, one stands over his grave with 
regret. It would have been a classic spot had Byron sur- 
vived to visit it. No event in his travels made more im- 
pression on his mind than the pasha's detecting his rank by 
the beauty of his hands. His fine description of the wild 
court of Yanina, in ' Childe Harold/ has already made the 
poet's return of immortality, but had he survived the revo- 
lution in Greec, with his increased knowledge of the Alba- 
nian soldier and his habits, and his esteem for the old chief- 
tain, a hero so much to his taste would have been his most 
natural theme. It remains to be seen whether the age or 
the language will produce another Byron to take up the 
broken thread. 

As we w T ere poring over the Turkish inscription, four 
"*en, apparently quite intoxicated, came running and hal- 
oing from the city gate, bearing upon their shoulders a 
/ead man on his bier. Entering the cemetery, they went 
stumbling on over the footstones, tossing the corpse about 
so violently, that the helpless limbs frequently fell beyond 
the limits of the rude barrow, while the grave-digger, the 
only sober person, save the dead man, in the company, fol- 
lowed at his best speed, with his pick-axe and shovel. These 
extraordinary bearers set down their burden not far from 
the gate, and, to my surprise, walked laughing off like men 
who had merely engaged in a moment's frolic by the way, 
while the sexton, left quite alone, composed a little the 
posture of the disordered body, and sat down to get breath 
for his task. 

My Constantinopolitan friend tells me that the Koran 



OLD STAMBOUL. 265 

blesses him who carries a dead body forty paces on its way 
to the grave. The poor are thus carried out to the ceme- 
teries by voluntary bearers, who, after they have completed 
their prescribed paces, change with the first individual whose 
reckoning with heaven may be in arrears. 

The corpse we had seen so rudely borne on its last journey, 
was, or had been, a middle-aged Turk. He had neither 
shroud nor coffin, but 

*« Lay like a gentleman taking a snooze," 

in his slippers and turban, the bunch of flowers on his 
bosom the only token that he was dressed for any particular 
occasion. We had not time to stay and see his grave dug, 
and " his face laid toward the tomb of the prophet." 

We entered the Adrianople gate, and crossed the tri- 
angle, which old Stamboul nearly forms, by a line approach- 
ing its hypothenuse. Though in a city so thickly populated, 
it was one of the most lonely walks conceivable. We met, 
perhaps, one individual in a street ; and the perfect silence, 
and the cheerless look of the Turkish houses, with their 
jealously-closed windows, gave it the air of a city devastated 
by the plague. The population of Constantinople is only 
seen in the bazaars, or in the streets bordering on the 
Golden Horn. In the extensive quarter occupied by dwell- 
ing-houses only, the inhabitants, if at home, occupy apart- 
ments opening on their secluded gardens, or are hidden 
from the gaze of the street by their fine dull -coloured lat- 
tices. It strikes one with melancholy after the gay balconies 
and open doors of France and Italy. 

We passed the Eski serai, the palace in which the im- 
perial widows wear their chaste weeds in solitude ; and, 
weary with our long walk, emerged from the silent streets 
at the bazaar of wax candles, and took naique for the Argen- 
topolis of the ancients, the " silver city " of Galata. 

* m # * * % # 

The thundering of guns from the whole Ottoman fleet 
in the Bosphorus announced, some days since, that the 
sultan had changed his summer for his winter serai, and 
the commodore received yesterday a firman to visit the 
deserted palace of Beylerbey. 



266 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

We left the frigate at an early hour, our large party of 
officers increased by the captain of the Acteon sloop-of-war, 
some gentlemen of the English ambassador's household, and 
several strangers, who took advantage of the commodore's 
courtesy to enjoy a privilege, granted so very rarely.^ 

As we pulled up the strait, some one pointed out the 

residence, on the European shore, of the once favourite 

wife, and now fat widow, of Sultan Selim. She is called 

# by the Turks the " boneless sultana/' and is the model of 

shape by the Oriental standard. The poet's lines, 

" Who turn'd that little waist with so much care, 
And shut perfection in so small a ring ?" 

though a very neat compliment in some countries, would be 
downright rudeness in the East, Near this jelly in weeds 
lives a venerable Turk, who was once ambassador to Eng- 
land. He came back too much enlightened, and the mufti 
immediately procured his exile for infidelity. He passes 
his day, we were told, in looking at a large map hung on 
the wall before him, and wondering at his own travels. 

We were received at the shining brazen gate of Beyler- 
bey, by Hamik Pasha, (a gentleman-like man, just returned 
from a mission to England) deputed by the sultan to do the 
honours. A side-door introduced us immediately to the 
grand hall upon the lower floor, which was separated only 
by four marble pillars, and a heavy curtain rolled up at 
will, from the gravel- walk of the garden in the rear. We 
ascended thence by an open-staircase of wood, prettily 
inlaid, to the second floor, which was one long suite of spa- 
cious rooms, built entirely in the French style, and thence 
to the third floor, the same thing over again. It was quite 
like looking at lodgings in Paris. There was no furniture, 
except an occasional ottoman turned with its face upon 
another, and a prodigious quantity of French musical clocks, 
three or four in every room, and all playing in our honour 
with an amusing confusion. One other article, by the way 
— a large, common American rocking chair ! The poor 
thing stood in a great gilded room, all alone, looking pitiably 
home sick. I seated myself in it, malgre a thick coat of 
dust upon the bottom, as I would visit a sick country ruau 
in exile. 



THE GOLDEN HORN. 267 

The harem was locked, and the polite pasha regretted 
that he had no orders to open it. We descended to the 
gardens, which rise by terraces to a gira -crack temple and 
orangery, and, having looked at the sultan's poultry, we 
took our leave. If his pink palace in Europe is no finer 
than his yellow palace in Asia, there is many a merchant 
in America better lodged than the padishah of the Ottoman 
empire. We have not seen the old seraglio, however ; 
and in its inaccessible recesses, probably, moulders that true 
Oriental splendour which this upholsterer monarch aban- 
dons in his rage for the novel luxuries of Europe. 



LETTER XXIII. 

THE GOLDEN HORN AND ITS SCENERT — THE SULTAN^ WIVES AND 

ARABIANS THE VALLEY OF SWEET WATERS BEAUTY OF THE 

TURKISH MINARETS THE MOSQUE OF SULYMANYE — MUSSUL- 
MANS AT THEIR DEVOTIONS — THE MUEZZIN THE BAZAAR OF 

THE OPIUM-EATERS — THE MAD-HOUSE OF CONSTANTINOPLE, 
AND DESCRIPTION OF ITS INMATES THEIR WRETCHED TREAT- 
MENT — THE HIPPODROME AND THE MOSQUE OF SULTAN ACHMET 

THE JANIZARIES. 

NOV. 1833. 

The "Golden Horn" is a curved arm of the sea, the 
broadest extremity meeting the Bosphorus and forming the 
harbour of Constantinople, and the other tapering away till 
it is lost in the " Valley of Sweet Waters." It curls through 
the midst of the seven-hilled city, and you cross it whenever 
you have an errand in old Stamboul. Its hundreds of shoot- 
ing caiques, its forests of merchantmen and men-of-war, its 
noise and its confusion are exchanged in scarce ten minutes 
of swift pulling for the breathless and Eden-like solitude of 
a valley that has not its parallel, I am inclined to think, 
between the Mississipi and the Caspian. It is called in 
Turkish khyat-khana. Opening with a gentle curve from 
the Golden Horn, it winds away into the hills towards Bel- 
grade, its long and even hollow, threaded by a lively stream 
and carpeted by a broad belt of unbroken green sward, 



263 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

swelling up to the inclosing hills with a grass so verdant 
and silken that it seems the very floor of faery. In the 
midst of its longest stretch to the eye, (perhaps two miles 
of level meadow,) stands a beautiful serai of the sultan's, 
unfenced and open, as if it had sprung from the lap of the 
green meadow like a lily. The stream runs by its door; 
and over a mimic fall, whose lip is of scolloped marble, is 
built an Oriental kiosk, all carving and gold, that is only 
too delicate and fantastical for reality. 

Here, with the first grass of spring, the sultan sends his 
fine- footed Arabians to pasture ; and here come the ladies 
of his harem, (chosen, women and horses, for much the 
same class of qualities) and in the long summer afternoons, 
with mounted eunuchs on the hills around, forbidding on 
pain of death all approach to the sacred retreat, they ven- 
ture to drop their jealous veils and ramble about in their 
unsunned beauty. 

After a gallop of three or four miles over the broad waste 
table-plains, in the neighbourhood of Constantinople, we 
checked our horses suddenly on the brow of a precipitous 
descent, with this scene of beauty spread out before us. I 
had not yet approached it by water, and it seemed to me 
as if the earth had burst open at my feet, and revealed some 
realm of enchantment. Behind me, and away beyond the 
valley to the very horizon, I could see only a trackless 
heath, brown and treeless, while, a hundred feet below, 
lay a strip of very paradise, blooming in all the verdure and 
heavenly freshness of spring. We descended slowly, and, 
crossing a bridge half-hidden by willows, rode in upon the 
elastic green sward, (for myself) with half a feeling of pro- 
fanation. There were no eunuchs upon the hills, however, 
and our spirited Turkish horses threw their wild heads into 
the air, and we flew over the verdant turf like a troop of 
Delhis, the sound of the hoofs on the yielding carpet 
scarcely audible. The fair palace in the centre of this 
domain of loveliness was closed, and it was only after we 
had walked around it that we observed a small tent of the 
prophet's green couched in a small dell on the hill-side, and 
containing probably the guard of its imperial master. 

vVY mounted again and rode up the valley for two or 
three miles, following the same level and verdant curve, 



TURKISH MINARETS. 269 

the soft carpet broken only by the silver thread of the Bar- 
byses, loitering through it on its way to the sea. A herd 
of buffaloes, tended by a Bulgarian boy, stretched on his 
back in the sunshine, and a small caravan of camels bring- 
ing wood from the hills, and keeping to the soft valley as a 
relief to their spongy feet, were the only animated portions 
of the landscape. I think I shall never form to my mind 
another picture of romantic rural beauty, (an employment 
of the imagination I am much given to when out of humour 
with the world) that will not resemble the " Valley of 
Sweet Waters'' — the khyat-khana of Constantinople. " Poor 
Slingsby " never was here.* 

The lofty mosque of Sulymanye, the bazaars of the 
opium-eaters, and the Timar-hane, or mad-house of Con- 
stantinople, are all upon one square in the highest part of 
the city. We entered the vast court of the mosque from a 
narrow and filthy street, and the impression of its towering 
plane-trees and noble area, and of the strange but grand 
and costly pile in its centre, w T as almost devotional. An 
inner court, inclosed by a kind of romanesque wall, con- 
tained a sacred marble fountain of light and airy archi- 
tecture ; and the portico facing this was sustained by some 
of those splendid and gigantic columns of porphyry and 
jasper, the spoils of the churches of Asia Minor, f 

I think the most beautiful spire that rises into the sky is 
the Turkish minaret. If I may illustrate an object of such 



* Irving says, in one of his most exquisite passages : — <( He who has sallied 
forth into the world like poor Slingsby, full of sunny anticipations, finds too soon 
how different the distant scene becomes when visited. The smooth place roughens 
as he approaches ; the wild place becomes tame and barren ; the fairy tints that 
beguiled him on, still fly to the distant hill, or gather upon the land he has left 
behind, and every part of the landscape is greener than the spot he stands on." 
Full of music and beautiful expression as this is, I, for one, have not found it true. 
Bright as I had imagined the much-sung lands beyond the water, I have found 
many a scene in Italy and the East that has more than answered the craving for 
beauty in my heart. Val d'Arno, Vallombrosa, Venice, Terni, Tivoli, Albano, the 
Isles of Greece, the Bosphorus, and the matchless Valley I have described, have, 
with a hundred other spots less famous, far outgone, in their exquisite reality, 
even the brightest of my anticipations. The passage is not necessarily limited in 
its meaning to scenery, however, and of moral disappointment it is beautifully 
true. There is many a " poor Slingsby," the fate of whose sunny anticipations 
of life it describes but too faithfully. 

t Sulymanye was built of the xuins of the church, Saint Euphemia, at Ch*- 
ecdoma. 



270 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

magnitude by so trifling a comparison, it is exactly the 
shape and proportions of an ever-pointed pencil-case — the 
silver bands answering to the encircling galleries, one above 
another, from which the muezzin calls out the hour of 
prayer. The minaret is painted white, the galleries are 
fantastically carved, and rising to the height of the highest 
steeples in our country, (four and sometimes six to a single 
mosque) these slender and pointed fingers of devotion seem 
to enter the very sky. Remembering, dear reader, that 
there are two hundred and twenty mosques, and three hun- 
dred chapels in Constantinople, raising, perhaps, in all, a 
thousand minarets to heaven, you may get some idea of the 
magnificence of this seven-hilled capital of the Orient. 

It was near the hour of prayer, and the devout mussul- 
mans were thronging into the court of Sulymanye by every 
gate. Passing the noble doors, with their strangely- carved 
arches of arabesque, which invite all to enter but the pro- 
faning foot of the Christian, the turbaned crowd repaired 
first to the fountains. From the walls of every mosque, by 
small conduits pouring into a marble basin, flow streams of 
pure water for the religious ablutions of the faithful. The 
mussulman approaches, throws off his flowing robe, steps 
out of his yellow slippers, and unwinds his voluminous 
turban with devout deliberateness. A small marble step, 
worn hollow with pious use, supports his foot while he 
washes from the knee downward. His hands and arms, 
with the flowing sleeve of his silk shirt rolled to the 
shoulder, receive the same lavation, and then, washing his 
face, he repeats a brief prayer, resumes all but his slippers, 
and enters the mosque barefooted. The mihrab (or niche 
indicating the side toward the tomb of the prophet) fixes 
his eye. He folds his hands together, prays a moment 
standing, prostrates himself flat on his face toward the 
hallowed quarter, rises upon his knees, and continues pray- 
ing and prostrating himself for perhaps half an hour. And 
all this process is required by the mufti, and performed by 
every good mussulman^ue times a-day ! A rigid adherence 
to it is almost universal among the Turks. In what an 
odour of sanctity would a Christian live, who should make 
himself thus " familiar with Heaven ! " 

As the muezzin from the minaret was shouting his last 



OPIUM-EATERS. 

" mashallah ! " with a voice like a man calling out from tb# 
clouds, we left the court of the majestic mosque, with 
Byron's reflection : 

** Alas I man makes that great which makes him little ! " 

and, having delivered ourselves of this scrap of poetical phi- 
losophy, we crossed over the square to the opium-eaters. 

A long row of half-ruined buildings, of a single story 
with porticoes in front, and the broad raised platform be- 
neath, on which the Turks sit cross-legged at public places, 
is the scene of what was once a peculiarly Oriental spectacle. 
The mufti has of late years denounced the use of opium, 
and the devotees to its sublime intoxication have either 
conquered the habit, or, what is more probable, indulge it 
in more secret places. The shops are partly ruinous, and 
those that remain in order are used as cafes, in which, how- 
ever, it is said that the dangerous drug may still be pro- 
cured. My companion inquired of a good-humoured-looking 
caffejee whether there was any place at which a confirmed 
opium-eater could be seen under its influence. He said 
there was an old Turk, who was in the habit of frequenting 
his shop, and, if we could wait an hour or two, we might 
see him in the highest state of intoxication. We had nc 
time to spare, if the object had been worth our while. 

And here, thought I, as we sat down and took a cup of 
coffee in the half- ruined cafe, have descended upon the 
delirious brains of these noble drunkards the visions of 
Paradise, so glowingly described in books — visions it is 
said, as far exceeding the poor invention of the poet, as trie 
houris of the prophet exceed the fair damsels of this worla. 
Here men, otherwise in their senses, have believed them- 
selves emperors, warriors, poets ; these wretched walls ana 
bending roof, the fair proportions of a palace ; this grav om 
caffejee, a Hylas or a Ganymede. Here men have come to 
cast off, for an hour, the dull thraldom of the body, to soar 
into the glorious world of fancy, at a penalty of a thous^r J j 
times the proportion of real misery ; to sacrifice the invalu- 
able energies of health, and deliberately poison the verv 
fountain of life, for a few brief moments of magnificent ano 
phrensied blessedness. It is powerfully describe J in V3e 
• Opium Eater ' of De Quincy. 



272 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

At the extremity of this line of buildings, by a natural 
proximity, stands the Timar~ha?ie. We passed the porter 
at the gate without question, and entered a large quad, 
rangle, surrounded with the grated windows of cells on the 
ground-floor. In every window was chained a maniac. 
The doors of the cells were all open, and, descending by a 
step upon the low stone floor of the first, we found ourselves 
in the presence of four men chained to rings, in the four 
corners, by massy iron collars. The man in the window 
sat crouched together, like a person benumbed, (the day 
was raw and cold as December,) the heavy chain of his 
collar hanging on his naked breast, and his shoulders im- 
perfectly covered with a narrow blanket. His eyes were 
large and fierce, and his mouth was fixed in an expression 
of indignant sulliness. My companion asked him if he 
were ill. He said he should be well if he were out — that 
he was brought there in a fit of intoxication two years ago, 
and was no more crazy than his keeper. Poor fellow ! It 
might easily be true. He lifted his heavy collar from his 
neck as he spoke, and it was not difficult to believe that 
misery like his for two long years would, of itself, destroy 
reason. There was a better- dressed man in the opposite 
corner, who informed us, in a gentlemanly voice, that he 
had been a captain in the sultan's army, and was brought 
there in the delirium of a fever. He was at a loss to know, 
he said, why he was imprisoned still. 

We passed on to a poor, half-naked wretch in the last 
stage of illness and idiocy, who sat chattering to himself, 
and, though trembling with the cold, interrupted his mono- 
logue continually with fits of the wildest laughter. Farther 
on sat a young man, of a face so full of intellectual beauty, 
an eye so large and mild, a mouth of such mingled sadness 
and sweetness, and a forehead so broad, and marked so 
nobly, that we stood, all of us, struck with a simultaneous 
feeling of pity and surprise. A countenance more beaming 
with all that is admirable in human nature I have never 
peen, even in painting. He might have sat to Da Vinci 
for the " Beloved Apostle." He had tied the heavy chain 
by a shred to a round of the grating, to keep its weight 
from his neck, and seemed calm and resigned, with all 
his sadness. My friend sp< ke to him, but he answered 



OPIUM-EATERS. 273 

^uscurely, and, seeing that our gaze disturbed him, we 
p\ssed unwillingly on. Oh, what room there is in the 
worid for pity ! If that poor prisoner be not a maniac, (as 
he may not be) and, if nature has not falsified in the 
structure of his mind the superior impress on his features, 
what Prometheus-like agony has he suffered ! The guiltiest 
felon is better cared for. And allowing his mind to be a 
wreck, and allowing the hundred human minds, in the 
same cheerless prison, to be certainly in ruins, oh, what 
have they done to be weighed down with iron on their 
necks, and exposed, like caged beasts, shivering and naked, 
to the eye of pitiless curiosity ? I have visited lunatic 
asylums in France, Italy, Sicily, and Germany, but, culpa- 
bly neglected as most of them are, I have seen nothing 
comparable to this in horror. " Is he never unchained ? " 

, we asked. " Never! " And yet, from the ring to the 
iron collar, there was just chain enough to permit him to 
stand upright ! There were no vessels near them, not even 
a pitcher of water. Their dens were cleansed and the poor 
surlerers fed at appointed hours, and, come wind or rain, 

I there was neither shutter nor glass to defend them from the 
in;Jemency of the weather. 

We entered most of the rooms, and found in all the same 
dampness, filth, and misery. One poor wretch had been 
chained to the same spot for twenty years. The keeper 
saio r*e never slept. He talked all the night long. Some- 
times at mid-day his voice would cease, and his head nod 

| for an instant, and then with a start, as if he feared to be 
sner.t., he raved on with the same incoherent rapidity. He 
hae Deen a dervish. His collar and chain were bound with 
ra#:s a and a tattered coat was fastened up on the inside of 
tr-e window, forming a small recess in which he sat, be- 
tween the room and the grating. He was emaciated to the 
last degree. His beard was tangled and filthy, his nails 
curiea over the ends of his fingers, and his appearance, save 
o^sr an eye of the keenest lustre, that of a wild beast. 

in the last room we entered, w 7 e found a good-looking 
young man, well-dressed, healthy, composed, and having 
every appearance of a person in the soundest state of mind 
ana Dody. He saluted us courteously, and told my friend 
tnat he was a renegade Greek. He had turned mussulman 

T 



27^ PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

a year or two ago, had lost his reason, and so was brought 
here. He talked of it quite as a thing of course, and seemed 
to be entirely satisfied that the best had been done for him. 
One of the party took hold of his chain. He winced as the 
collar stirred on his neck, and said the lock was on the 
outside of the window, (which was true,) and that the boys 
came in and tormented him by pulling it sometimes. 
"There they are," he said, pointing to two or three chil- 
dren who had just entered the court, and were running 
'round from one prisoner to another. We bade him good- 
morning, and he laid his hand to his breast and bowed with 
a smile. As we passed toward the gate, the chattering 
lunatic on the opposite side screamed after us; the old 
dervish laid his skinny hands on the bars of his window, 
and talked louder and faster 5 and the children, approaching 
close to the poor creatures, laughed with delight at their 
excitement. 

It was a relief to escape to the common sights and sounds 
of the city. We walked on to the Hippodrome. The only 
remaining beauty of this famous square is the unrivalled 
mosque of Sultan Achmet, which, though inferior in size to 
the renowned Santa Sophia, is superior in elegance both 
within and without. Its six slender and towering minarets 
are the handsomest in Constantinople. The wondrous obelisk, 
in the centre of the square, remains perfect as in the tim 
of the Christian emperors, but the brazen tripod is gon 
from the twisted column, and the serpent-like pillar itsel: 
is leaning over with its brazen folds to its fall. 

Here stood the barracks of the powerful Janizaries, an 
from the side of Sultan Achmet the cannon were levelle 
upon them, as they rushed from the conflagration within. 
And here, when Constantinople was the " second Rome," 
were witnessed the triumphal processions of Christian con- 
quest, the march of the crusaders, bound for Palestine, and 
the civil tumults which Justinian, walking among the 
people with the Gospel in his hand, tried in vain to allay 
ere they burnt the great edifice built of the ruins of the 
temple of Solomon. And around this now-neglected area, 
the captive Gelimer followed in chains the chariot of the 
conquering Belisarius, repeating the words of Solomon, 
" Vanity of vanities ! all is vanity ! " while the conqueror 



MAHMOUD AT MOSQUE. 275 

himself, throwing aside Lis crown, prostrated himself at the 
feet of the beautiful Theodora, raised from a Roman actress 
to be the Christian empress of the East. From any elevated 
point of the city, you may still see the ruins of the palace 
of the renowned warrior, and read yourself a lesson on 
human vicissitudes, remembering the school-book story of 
" an obolon for Belisarius ! " 

The Hippodrome was, until late years, the constant scene 
of the games of the jereed. With the destruction of the 
Janizaries, and the introduction of European tactics, this 
graceful exercise has gone out of fashion. The East is fast 
losing its picturesqueness. Dress, habits, character, every 
thing seems to be undergoing a gradual change ; and when, 
as the Turks themselves predict, the moslem is driven into 
Asia, this splendid capital will become another Paris, and, 
with the improvements in travel, a summer in Constanti- 
nople will be as little thought of as a tour in Italy. Poli- 
ticians in this part of the world predict such a change as 
about to arrive. 



LETTER XXIV. 

SULTAN MAHMOUD AT HIS DEVOTIONS — COMPARATIVE SPLENDOUR 

OF PAPAL, AUSTRIAN, AND TURKISH EQUIPAGES THE SULTANAS 

BARGE OR CAIQUE — DESCRIPTION OF THE SULTAN — VISIT TO 
A TURKISH LANCASTERIAN SCHOOL — THE DANCING DERVISHES 

VISIT FROM THE SULTANAS CABINET THE SERASKIER AND 

THE CAPITAN PASHA HUMBLE ORIGIN OF TURKISH DIG- 
NITARIES. 

Nov. 1833. 

I had slept on shore, and it was rather late before I re- 
membered that it was Friday, (the moslem Sunday) and 
that Sultan Mahmoud was to go in state to the mosque at 
twelve. I hurried down the precipitous street of Pera, and, 
as usual, escaping barely with my life from the Christian- 
I hating dogs of Tophana, embarked in a caique, and made 
all speed up the Bosphorus. There is no word in Turkish 
for faster, but I was urging on my caijkees by a wave of 

t 2 



276 PEPsXILLlNGS BY THE WAY. 

the hand and the sight of a bishlik, (about the value of a 
quarter of a dollar,) when, suddenly, a broadside was fired 
from the three-decker, jVIahmoudier, the largest ship in the 
world ; and to the rigging of every man-of-war in the ileet 
through which I was passing mounted, simultaneously, 
hundreds of blood-red flags, filling the air about lis like a 
shower of tulips and roses. Imagine twenty ships-of-war, 
with yards manned, and scarce a line in their rigging to be 
seen for the flaunting of colours ! The jar of the guns, 
thundering in every direction close over us, almost lifted 
our light boat out of the water, and the smoke rendered 
our pilotage between the ships and among their extending 
cables rather doubtful. The white cloud lifted after a few 
minutes, and, with the last gun, down went the flags alto- 
gether, announcing that the " Brother of the Sun," had 
left his palace. 

He had but crossed to the mosque of the small village on 
the opposite side of the Bosphorus, and was already at his 
prayers, when I arrived. His body-guard was drawn up 
before the door, in their villanous European dress ; and, as 
their arms were stacked, I presumed it would be some time 
before the sultan re-appeared, and improved the interval in 
examining the hanja bashes, or state-caiques, lying at the 
landing. I have arrived at my present notions of equipage 
by three degrees. The pope's carriages at Rome, rather 
astonished me ; the emperor of Austria's sleighs diminished 
the pope in my admiration ; and the sultan's caiques, in their 
turn, " pale the fires " of the emperor of Austria. The 
hanja-bash is built something like the ancient galley, very 
high at the prow and stern, carries some fifty oars, and has 
a roof over her poop, supported by four columns, and loaded 
with the most sumptuous ornaments, the whole gilt bril- 
liantly. The prow is curved over, and wreathed into every 
possible device that would not affect the necessary lines of 
the model ; her crew are dressed in the beautiful costume 
of the country, rich, and flowing 5 and with the costly and 
hright-coloured carpets hanging over her side, and the 
flashing of the sun on her ornaments of gold, she is really 
the most splendid object of state-equipage (if I may be 
allowed the misnomer) in the world. I was still examining 
the principal barge, whe** ^ troops stood to their arms, 



TURKISH SCHOOL, 277 

and preparation was made for the passing out of the suitan. 
Thirty or forty of his highest military officers formed them- 
selves into two lines from the door of the mosque to the 
landing, and behind them were drawn up single files of 
soldiers. I took advantage of the respect paid to the rank 
of Commodore Patterson, and obtained an excellent position, 
with him, at the side of the caique. First issued from the 
door two Georgian slaves, bearing censers, from which they 
waved the smoke on either side, and the sultan immediately 
followed, supported by the capitan pasha, the seraskier, and 
Haleil Pasha (who is to marry the sultana Esmeh). He 
walked slowly down to the landing, smiling and talking 
gaily with the seraskier, and, bowing to the commodore in 
passing, stepped into his barge, seated himself on a raised 
sofa, while his attendants coiled their legs on the carpet 
below, and turned his prow across the Bosphorus. 

I have perhaps, never set my eyes on a handsomer man 
than Sultan Mahmoud. His figure is tall, straight, and 
manly ; his air unembarrassed and dignified ; and his step 
indicative of the well-known firmness of his character. A 
superb beard of jetty blackness, with a curling moustache, 
conceal all the lower part of his face ; the decided and bold 
lines of his mouth just marking themselves when he speaks. 
It is said he both paints and dyes his beard, but a 
manlier brown upon a cheek, or a richer gloss upon a beard 
I never saw. His eye is described by writers as having a 
doomed darkness of expression, and it is certainly one that 
would well become a chief of bandits — large, steady, and 
overhung with an eyebrow like a thunder-cloud. He looks 
the monarch. The child of a seraglio (where mothers are 
chosen for beauty alone) could scarce escape being hand- 
some. The blood of Circassian upon Circassian is in his 
veins, and the wonder is, not that he is the handsomest 
man in his empire, but that he is not the greatest slave. 
Our " mother's humour," they say, predominates in oui 
mixtures. Sultan Mahmoud, however was marked by 
nature for a throne. 

I accompanied Mr. Goodell and Mr. D wight, American 
missionaries at Constantinople, to visit a Lancasterian 
school established with their assistance in the Turkish 
barracks. The building stands on the ascent of one of the 



278 PEXCIJXTNG.* T»Y THE WAY. 

lovely valleys that open into the Bosphorus* some three 
miles from the city, on the European side. We were re- 
ceived by the colonel of the regiment, a young man of fine 
appearance, with the diamond crescent and star glittering 
on the breast of his military frock ; and after the inevitable 
compliment of pipes and coffee, the drum was beat and 
the soldiers called to school. 

The sultan has an army of boys. Nine- tenths of those 
I have seen are under twenty. They marched in, in single 
file, and, facing about, held up their hands at the word of 
command, while a subaltern looked that each had performed 
the morning ablution. They were healthy-looking lads, 
mostly from the interior provinces, whence they are driven 
down like cattle to fill the ranks of their sovereign. Duller- 
looking subjects for an idea it has not been my fortune 
to see. 

The Turkish alphabet hung over the teacher's desk, (the 
colonel is the schoolmaster, and takes the greatest interest 
in his occupation) and the front seats are faced with a long 
box covered with sand, in which the beginners write with 
their fingers. It is fitted with a slide that erases the 
clumsy imitation when completed, and seemed to me an in- 
genious economy of ink and paper. (I would suggest to 
the minds of the benevolent a school on the same principle 
for beginners in poetry. It would save the critics much 
murder, and tend to the suppression of suicide.) The 
classes having filed into their seats, the school opened with 
a prayer by the colonel. The higher benches then com- 
menced writing, on slates and paper, sentences dictated 
from the desk, and I was somewhat surprised at the neat- 
ness and beauty of the characters. 

We passed afterward into another room, where arithmetic 
and geography were taught, and then mounted to an apart- 
ment on the second story occupied by students in military 
drawing. The proficiency of all was most creditable, con- 
sidering the brief period during which the schools have 
been in operation — something less than a year. Prejudiced 
as the Turks are against European innovation, this advanced 
step toward improvement tells well. Our estimable and 
useful missionaries appear, from the respect every where 
shown to them, to be in high esteem ; and, with the sultan's 



CHAPEL OF THE DANCING DERVISHES. 279 

energetic disposition for reform, they hope everything in 
the way of an enlightened change in the moral condition of 
the people. 

Went to the chapel of the dancing dervishes. It is a 
beautiful marble building, with a court-yard ornamented 
with a small cemetery shaded with cypresses, and a fountain 
enclosed in a handsome edifice, and defended by gilt gratings 
from the street of the suburb of Pera, in which it stands. 
They dance here twice a week. We arrived before the 
hour, and were detained at the door by a soldier on guard, 
who would not permit us to enter without taking off our 
boots — a matter about which, between straps and their 
very muddy condition, we had some debate. The dervishes 
began to arrive before the question was settled, and one of 
them, a fine-looking old man, inviting us to enter, Mr. 

H explained the difficulty. " Go in/' said he, "go 

in !" and turning to -the more scrupulous mussulman with 
the musket as he pushed us within the door — u Stupid 
fellow !" said he " if you had been less obstinate, they 
would have given you a backshish " (Turkish for a/ee.) He 
should have said less religious — for the poor fellow looked 
horror-struck as our dirty boots profaned the clean white 
Persian matting of the sacred floor. One would think, 
"the nearer the church, the farther from God," were as 
true here as it is said to be in some more civilised countries. 

Jt was a pretty octagonal interior, with a gallery, the 
milirab or niche indicating the direction of the prophet's 
tomb, standing obliquely from the front of the building. 
Hundreds of small lamps hung in the area, just out of the 
reach of the dervishes' tall caps, and, all around between 
the galleries, a part of the floor was raised, matted, and 
divided from the body of the church by a balustrade. It 
would have made an exceedingly pretty ball-room. 

None but the dervishes entered within the paling ; and 
they soon began to enter, each advancing first towards the 
mihrab, and going through fifteen or twenty minutes' 
prostrations and prayers. Their dress is very humble. A 
high, white felt-cap, without a rim, like a sugar-loaf en- 
larged a little at the smaller end, protects the head, and a 
long dress of dirt-coloured cloth, reaching quite to the heels 



g80 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

and bound at the waist with a girdle, completes the 
costume. They look like men who have made up their 
minds to seem religious, and, though said to be a set of 
very good fellows, they have a Maw-worm expression of 
face generally, which was very repulsive. I must except 
the chief of the sect, however, who entered when all the 
rest had seated themselves on the floor, and after a brief 
genuflexion or two, took possession of a rich Angora carpet 
placed for him near the mihrab. He was a small old man, 
distinguished in his dress only by the addition of a green 
band to his cap, (the sign of his pilgrimage to Mecca) and 
the entire absence of the sanctimonious look. Still he was 
serious, and there was no mark in his clear, intelligent eye 
and amiable features, of any hesitancy or want of sincerity 
in his devotion. He is said to be a learned man, and he 
is certainly a very prepossessing one, though he would be 
taken up as a beggar in any city in the United States. It 
is a thing one learns in " dangling about the world," by the 
way, to form opinions of men quite independently of their 
dress. 

After sitting a while in quaker meditation, the brother- 
hood rose one by one, (there were ten of them, I think) 
and marched round the room with their toes turned in, to 
the music of a drum and a Persian flute, played invisibly 
in some part of the gallery. As they passed the carpet of 
the cross-legged chief they twisted dexterously and made 
three salaams, and then raising their arms, which they held 
out straight during the whole dance, they commenced 
twirling on one foot, using the other after the manner of a 
paddle, to keep up the motion. I forgot to mention that 
they laid aside their outer dresses before commencing the 
dance. They remained in dirty white tunics reaching to 
the floor, and very full at the bottom, so that with the 
regular motion of their whirl the wind blew them out into 
a circle, like what the girls in our country call " making 
cheeses/' They twisted with surprising exactness and 
rapidity, keeping clear of each other, and maintaining their 
places with the regularity of machines. I have seen a 
great deal of waltzing, but I think the dancing dervishes, 
for precision and spirit, might give a lesson even to the 
Germans. 



sultan's cabinet. 281 

We left them twisting. They had been going for half 
an hour, and it began to look very like perpetual motion* 
Unless their brains are addled, their devotion, during this 
dizzy performance at least, must be quite suspended. A 
man who could think of his Maker, while revolving so fast 
that his nose is indistinct, must have some power of 

abstraction. 

***** 

The frigate was visited to-day by the sultan's cabinet. 
The seraskier pasha came along side first in his state caique, 
and embraced the commodore, as he stepped upon the deck, 
with great cordiality. He is a short, fat old man, with a 
snow-white beard, and so bow-legged as to be quite de- 
formed. He wore the red Fez cap of the army, with a long 
blue frock-coat, the collar so tight as nearly to choke him, 
and the body not shaped to the figure, but made to fall 
around him like a sack. The red bloated skin of his neck 
fell over so as almost to cover the gold with which the 
collar was embroidered. He was formerly capitan pasha, 
or admiral- in -chief of the fleet ; and, though a good- 
humoured, merry-looking old man, has shown himself, both 
in his former and present capacity, to be wily, cold, and a 
butcher in cruelty. He possesses unlimited influence over 
the sultan, and though nominally subordinate to the grand 
vizier, is really the second, if not the first, person in the 
empire. He was originally a Georgian slave. 

The seraskier was still talking with the commodore in the 
gangway, when the present capitan pasha mounted the 
ladder, and the old man, who is understood to be at feud 
with his successor, turned abruptly away and walked aft. 
The capitan pasha is a tall, slender man, of precisely that 
look and manner which we call gentlemanly. His beard 
grows untrimmed in the Turkish fashion, and is slightly 
touched with gray. His eye is anxious but resolute, and 
he looks like a man of resource and ability. His history is 
as singular as that of most other great men in Turkey. He 
w r as a slave of Mohammed Ali, the rebellious pasha ot 
Egypt. Being entrusted by his master with a brig and 
cargo for Leghorn, he sold vessel and lading, lived like a 
gentleman in Italy for some years with the proceeds, and, 
as the best security against the retribution of his old master, 



282 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

offered Ills services to the sultan, with whom Ah was just 
commencing hostilities. Naval talent was in request, and 
he soon arrived at his present dignity. He is said to be- 
the only officer in the fleet who knows any thing of his. 
profession. 

Haleil Pasha arrived last. The sultan's future son-in-law- 
is a man of perhaps thirty-five. He is light-complexioned, 
stout, round-faced, and looks like a respectable grocer, " well 
to do in the world." He has commanded the artillery long 
enough to have acquired a certain air of ease and command, 
and carries the promise of good fortune in his confident fea- 
tures. He is to be married almost immediately. He, too, 
was a Georgian, sent as a present to the sultan. 

The three dignitaries made the rounds of the ship, and 
then entered the cabin, where the piano-forte, (a novelty to 
the seraskier and Haleil Pasha, and to most of the attend- 
ant officers) and the commodore's agreeable society and 
champagne, promised to detain them the remainder of the 
day. They were like children with a holiday. I was. 
engaged to dine on shore, and left them on board. 

In a country where there is no education and no rank,, 
except in the possession of present power, it is not sur- 
prising that men should rise from the lowest class to the 
highest offices, or that they should fill those offices to the 
satisfaction of the sultan. Yet it is curious to hear their 
histories. An English physician, who is frequently called 
in to the seraglio, and whose practice among all the families 
in power gives him the best means of information, has 
entertained me not a little with these secrets. I shall make 
use of them when I have more leisure, merely mentioning 
here, in connexion with the above accounts, that the present 
grand vizier was a boatman on the Bosphorus, and the com- 
mander of the sultan's body-guard a shoemaker ! The 
latter still employs all his leisure in making slippers, which 
lie presents to the sultan and his friends, not at all ashamed 
of his former vocation. So far, indeed, are any of these 
mushroom officers from blushing at their origin, that it is 
common to prefix the name of their profession to the title of 
pasha, and they are addressed by it as a proper name. This, 
is one respect in which their European education will refine 
them to their disadvantage. 



BAZAAR. 283 



LETTER XXV. 

THE GRAND BAZAAR OF CONSTANTINOPLE, AND ITS INFINITE VA- 
RIETY OF WONDERS SILENT SHOPKEEPERS FEMALE CURIOSITY 

ADVENTURE WITH A BLACK-EYED STRANGER — THE EEZESTEIN 

THE STRONGHOLD OF ORIENTALISM PICTURE OF A DRAGO- 
MAN — THE KIBAUB-SHOP ; A DINNER WITHOUT KNIVES, FORKS,. 
OR CHAIRS — CISTERN OF THE THOUSAND-AND-ONE COLUMNS. 

Nov. 1835. 

Bring all the shops of New York, Philadelphia, and 
Boston together around the City Hall ; remove their fronts, 
pile up all their goods on shelves facing the street ; cover 
the whole with a roof, and metamorphose your trim clerks 
into bearded, turbaned, and solemn old mussulmen, smooth 
Jews, and calpacked and rosy Armenians, and you will have 
something like the grand bazaar of Constantinople. You 
can scarcely get an idea of it without having been there. It 
is a city under cover. You walk all day, and day after day, 
from one street to another, winding and turning, and trudg- 
ing up hill and down, and never go out of doors. The roof 
is as high as those of our three-story houses, and the dim 
light so favourable to shopkeepers comes struggling down 
through sky-lights never cleaned except by the rains of 
heaven. 

Strolling through the bazaar is an endless amusement. It 
is slow work, for the streets are as crowded as a church- 
aisle after service ; and, pushed aside one moment by a bevy 
of Turkish ladies, shuffling along in their yellow slippers, 
muffled to the eyes; the next by a fat slave carrying a 
child ; again by a kervas armed to the teeth, and clearing 
the way for some coming dignitary, you find your only 
policy is to draw in your elbows, and suffer the motley 
crowd to shove you about at their pleasure. 

Each shop in this world of traffic may be two yards wide. 
The owner sits cross-legged on the broad counter below, 
the height of a chair from the ground, and hands you all 
you want without stirring from his seat. One broad bench 
or counter runs the length of the street, and the different 



284 PENCILLING BY THE WAY. 

shops are only divided by the slight partition of the shelves. 
The purchaser seats himself on the counter, to be out of 
the way of the crowd, and the shopman spreads out his 
goods on his knees, never condescending to open his lips 
except to tell you the price. If he exclaims " bono" or 
" kalo" (the only word a real Turk ever knows of another 
language) he is stared at by his neighbours as a man would 
be in Broadway who should break out with an Italian 
bravura. Ten to one, while you are examining his goods, 
the bearded trader creeps through the hole leading to his 
kennel of a dormitory in the rear, washes himself and re- 
turns to his counter, where, spreading his sacred carpet in 
the direction of Mecca, he goes through his prayers and 
prostrations, perfectly unconscious of your presence, or that 
of the passing crowd. No vocation interferes with his reli- 
gious duty. Five times a day, if he were running from 
the plague, the mussulman would find time for prayers. 

The Frank purchaser attracts a great deal of curiosity, 
As he points to an embroidered handkerchief, or a rich 
shawl, or a pair of gold- worked slippers, Turkish ladies of 
the first rank, gathering their yaskmachs securely over 
their faces, stop close to his side, not minding if they push 
him a little to get nearer the desired article. Feeling not 
the least timidity, except for their faces, these true children 
of Eve examine the goods in barter, watch the stranger's 
countenance, and if he takes off his glove, or pulls out his 
purse, take it up and look at it, without ever saying " by 
your leave.'' Their curiosity often extends to your dress, 
and they put out their little henno-stained fingers and pass 
them over the sleeve of your coat with a gurgling expression 
of admiration at its fineness ; or if you have rings or * 
watch-guard, they lift your hand or pull out your watc* 
with no kind of scruple. I have met with several instances 
of this in the course of my rambles ; but a day or two ago 
I found myself rather more than usual a subject of curiosity. 
I was alone in the street of embroidered handkerchiefs, 
(every minute article has its peculiar bazaar) and, wishing 
to look at some of uncommon beauty, I called one of the 
many Jews always near a stranger to turn a penny by 
interpreting for him, and was soon up to the elbows in 
goods that would tempt a female angel out of Paradise. 



BEZESTEIN. 285 

As I was selecting one for a purchase, a woman plumped 
down upon the seat beside me, and fixed her great, black, 
unwinking eyes upon my face, while an Abyssinian slave 
and a white woman, both apparently her dependents, stood 
respectfully at her back. A small turquoise ring (the 
favourite colour in Turkey) first attracted her attention 
She took up my hand, and turned it over in her soft, fat 
fingers, and dropped it again without saying a word. I 
looked at my interpreter, but he seemed to think it nothing 
extraordinary, and I went on with my bargain. Presently 
my fine-eyed friend pulled me by the sleeve, and, as I leaned 
toward her, rubbed her forefinger very quickly over my 
cheek, looking at me intently all the while. I was a little 
disturbed with the lady's familiarity, and asked my Jew 
what she wanted. I found that my rubicund complexion 
was something uncommon among these dark-skinned Orien- 
tals, and she wished to satisfy herself that I was not painted ! 
I concluded my purchase, and, putting the parcel into my 
pocket, did my prettiest at an Oriental salaam, but to 
my mortification the lady only gathered up her yashmack, 
and looked surprised out of her great eyes at my freedom. 
My Constantinople friends inform me that I am to lay no 
" unction to my soul " from her notice, such liberties being 
not at all particular. The husband exacts from his half- 
dozen wives only the concealment of their faces, and they* 
have no other idea of impropriety in public. 

In the centre of the bazaar, occupying about as much 
space as the body of the City-hall in New York, is what is 
called the bezestein. You descend into it from four direc- 
tions by massive gates, which are shut, and all persons ex- 
cluded, except between seven and twelve of the forenoon. 
This is the core of Constantinople — the soul and citadel of 
Orientalism. It is devoted to the sale of arms and to costly 
articles only. The roof is loftier and the light more dim 
than in the outer bazaars, and the merchants who occupy 
its stalls are old and of established credit. Here are sub* 
jects for the pencil ! If you can lake your eye from those 
Damascus sabres, with their jewelled hilts and costly 
scabbards, or from those gemmed daggers and guns inlaid 
with silver and gold, cast a glance along that dim avenue, 
and see what a range there is of glorious old gray-beards, 



286 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

with their snowy turbans ! These are the Turks of the 
old regime, before Sultan Mahmoud disfigured himself with 
a, coat like a " dog of a Christian ," and broke in upon the 
customs of the Orient. These are your opium-eaters, who 
smoke even in their sleep, and would not touch wine if it 
were handed them by houris! These are your fatalists, 
who would scarce take the trouble to get out of the way 
of a lion, and who are as certain of the miracle of Mahomet's 
coffin as of the length of the pipe, or of the quality of the 
•tobacco of Shiraz. 

I have spent many an hour in the bezestein, steeping my 
fancy in its rich Orientalism, and sometimes trying to make 
a purchase for myself or others. It is curious to see with 
what perfect indifference these old cross-legs attend to the 
wishes of a Christian. I was idling round one day with an 
English traveller, whom I had known in Italy, when a 
Persian robe of singular beauty hanging on one of the stalls 
arrested my companion's attention. He had with him his 
Turkish dragoman ; and as the old merchant was smoking 
away and looking right at us, we pointed to the dress over 
his head, and the interpreter asked to see it. The mussul- 
man smoked calmly on, taking no more notice of us than 
of the white clouds curling through his beard. He might 
have sat for Michael Angelo's Moses. Thin, pale, cairn, 
and of a statue-like repose of countenance and posture, with 
a large old-fashioned turban, and a curling beard half- 
mingled with gray, his neck bare, and his fine bust enve- 
loped in the flowing and bright- coloured drapery of the 
East — I had never seen a more majestic figure. He evi- 
dently did not wish to have any thing to do with us. At 
last I took out my snuff-box, and, addressing him with 
c Effendi !" the Turkish title of courtesy, laid my hand on 
my breast and offered him a pinch. Tobacco in this un- 
accustomed shape is a luxury here, and the amber mouth- 
piece emerged from his moustache, and putting his three 
fingers into my box, he said ie pekkhe !" the Turkish ejacu- 
lation of approval. He then made room for us on his 
carpet, and with a cloth measure took the robe from its 
nail, and spread it before us. My friend bought it un- 
hesitatingly for a dressing-gown, and we spent an hour in 
looking at shawls, of prices perfectly startling, arms, 



challices for incense, spotless amber for pipes, pearls, 

bracelets of the time of Sultan Selim, and an endless 

variety of " things rich and rare." The closing of the 

bezestein-gates interrupted our agreeable employment, and 

our old friend gave us the parting salaam very cordially for 

a Turk. I have been there frequently since, and never 

pass without offering my snuff-box, and taking a whiff or 

two from his pipe, which I cannot refuse, though it is no' 

out of his mouth, except when offered to a friend, from sun 

rise till midnight. 

•* *• * * * * 

One of the regular " lions " of Constantinople is i 
lcibaub-shop, or Turkish restaurant. In a ramble with oui 
consul, the other day, in search of a newly-discoverec 
cistern of a thousand-and-one columns/' we found ourselves, 
at the hungry hour of twelve, opposite a famous shop near 
the slave market. ' I was rather staggered at the first 
glance. A greasy fellow, with his shirt rolled to his 
shoulders, stood near the door, commending his shop to the 
world by slapping on the flank a whole mutton that hung 
beside him, while, as a customer came in, he dexterously 
whipped out a slice, had it cut in a twinkling into bits as 
large as a piece of chalk, (I have stopped five minutes in 
vain, to find a better comparison) strung upon a long iron 
skewer, and laid on the coals. My friend is an old Con- 
stantinopolitan, and had eaten kibaubs before. He entered 
without hesitation, and the adroit butcher, giving his big 
trowsers a fresh hitch, and tightening his girdle, made a 
new cut for his "narrow-legged" customers, and wished 
us a good appetite ; (the Turks looked with great contempt 
on our tight pantaloons, and distinguish us by this epithet.) 
We got on the platform, crossed our legs under us as 
well as we could, and I cannot deny, that the savoury 
missives that occasionally reached my nostrils bred a gradual 
reconciliation between my stomach and my eyes. 

In some five minutes, a tin platter was set between us, 
loaded with piping-hot kibaubs, sprinkled with salad, and 
mixed with bits of bread ; our friend the cook, by way of 
making the amiable, stirring it up well with his fingers 
as he brought it along. As Modely says in the play, Ci In 
love or mutton, I generally fail to without ceremony/ 



288 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

but, spite of its agreeable flavour, I shut my eyes, and 
selected a very small bit, before I commenced upon the 
kibaubs. It was very good eating, I soon found out, and 
my fingers once greased, (for you are indulged with neithej 
knife, fork, nor skewer in Turkey ) I proved myself as good 
a trencher man as my friend. 

The middle and lower classes of Constantinople live 
between these shops and the cafes. A dish of kibaubs 
serves them for dinner, and they drink coffee, which they 
•get for about half a cent a cup, from morning till night. 
We paid for our mess, (which was more than any two men 
could eat at once, unless very hungry) twelve cents. 

We started again with fresh courage, in search of the 
cistern. We soon found the old one, which is an immense 
excavation, with a roof, supported by five hundred granate 
columns, employed now as a place for twisting silk j and 
escaping from its clamorous denizens, who rushed up after 
us to the daylight, begging paras, we took one of the boys 
for a guide, and soon found the object of our search. 

Knocking at the door of a half ruined house, in one of 
the loneliest streets of the city, an old, sore-eyed Armenian, 
with a shabby calpack and every mark of extreme poverty, 
admitted us, pettishly demanding our entrance-money 
before he let us pass the threshold. Flights of steps, 
dangerously ruinous, led us down, first into a garden, far 
below the level of the street, and thence into a dark and 
damp cavern, the bottom of which was covered with water. 
As the eye became accustomed to the darkness, we could 
distinguish tall and beautiful columns of marble and 
granite, with superb Corinthian capitals, perhaps thirty 
feet in height, receding as far as the limits of our obscured 
sight. The old man said there were a thousand of them* 
The number was doubtless exaggerated, but we saw enough 
to convince us, that here was covered up, almost unknown, 
one of the most costly and magnificent works of the Christian 
emperors of Constantinople. 



TURKISH BATHS. 289 

LETTER XXVI. 

THE PERFECTION OF BATHING — PirES — DOWNY CUSHIONS — COFFEE 

RUBBING DOWN " CIRCULAR JUSTICE," AS DISPLAYED IN 

THE RETRIBUTION OF BOILED LOBSTERS A DELUGE OF SUDS 

THE SHAMPOO LUXURIOUS HELPS TO IMAGINATION A PEDES- 
TRIAN EXCURSION STORY OF AN AMERICAN TAR, BURDENED 

WITH SMALL CHANGE BEAUTY OF THE TURKISH CHILDREN 

A CIVILISED MONSTER GLIMPSE AT SULTAN MAHMOUD IN AN 

ILL HUMOUR. 

" Time is (not) money " in the East. We were three 
hours to- day at the principal bath of Constantinople, going 
through the ordinary process of the establishment, and were 
out-stayed, at last, by two Turkish officers who had entered 
with us. During this time, we had each the assiduous 
service of an attendant, and coffee, lemonade, and pipes ad 
libitum, for the consideration of half a Spanish dollar. 

Although I have once described a Turkish bath, the 

metropolitan " pomp and circumstance " so far exceed the 

provincial in this luxury, that I think I shall be excused 

for dwelling a moment upon it again. The dressing-room 

opens at once from the street. We descended half-a-dozen 

. steps to a stone floor, in the centre of which stood a large 

| marble fountain. Its basin was kept full by several jets- 

d'eau, which threw the silver curves into the air ; and the 

edge was set round with narghiles, (or Persian water-pipes 

with glass vases) ready for the smokers of the mild tobacco 

of Shiraz. The ceiling of this large hall was lofty, and the 

| sides were encircled by three galleries, one above the other, 

I with open balustrades, within which the bathers undressed. 

| In a corner sat several attendants, with only a napkin 

around their waists, smoking till their services should b€ 

required -, and one who had just come from the inner bath, 

streaming with perspiration, covered himself with cloths, 

and lay crouched upon a carpet till he could bear, with 

safety, the temperature of the outer air. 

A half-naked Turk, without his turban, looks more a 
Mephistopheles than a Ganymede, and I could scarce for- 
bear shrinking as the shaven-headed troop of servitors 

v 



290 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

seized upon us, and, without a word, pulled off our boots, 
thrust our feet into slippers, and led us up into the gallery 
to undress. An ottoman, piled with cushions, and over- 
hung, ou the wall, by a small mirror, was allotted to each ; 
and with the assistance of my familiar, (who was quite too 
familiar) I found myself stripped nolens volens, and^a snowy 
napkin, with a gold-embroidered edge, twisted into a be- 
coming turban around my head. 

We were led immediately into the first bath, a small 
• room, in which the heat, for the first breath or two, seemed 
rather oppressive. Carpets were spread for us on the warm 
marble floor, and crossing our legs, with more ease than 
when cased in our un- Oriental pantaloons, we were served 
with pipes and coffee of a delicious flavour. 

After a half hour, the atmosphere, so warm when we 
entered, began to feel chilly, and we were taken by the 
arm, and led by our speechless mussulman, through an in- 
termediate room, into the grand bath. The heat here seemed 
to me, for a moment, almost intolerable. The floor was hot, 
and the air so moist with the suffocating vapour, as to rest 
like mist upon the skin. It was a spacious and vaulted 
room, with, perhaps, fifty small square windows in the 
dome, and four arched recesses in the sides, supplied with 
marble seats, and small reservoirs of hot and cold water. 
In the centre was a broad platform, on which the bather 
was rubbed and shampooed, occupied, just then, by two or 
three dark-skinned Turks, lying on their backs, with their 
eyes shut, dreaming, if one might judge by their counte- 
nances, of Paradise. 

After being left to walk about for a half hour, by this 
time bathed in perspiration, our respective demons seized 
upon us again, and led us to the marble seats in the re- 
cesses. Putting a rough mitten on the right hand, my 
Turk then commenced upon my breast, scouring me, with- 
out water or mercy, from head to foot, and turning me 
over on my face or my back, without the least " by-your- 
leave" expression in his countenance, and with an adroit- 
ness which, in spite of the novelty of my situation, I could 
not but admire. I hardly knew whether the sensation was 
pleasurable or painful. I was less in doubt presently, when 
he seated me upright, and, with the brazen cup of the 



TURKISH BATH3. 291 

fountain, dashed upon my peeled shoulders a quantity of 
half-boiling water. If what Barnacle, in the play, calls a 
" circular justice," existed in the world, I should have 
thought it a judgment for eating of lobsters. My familiar 
was somewhat startled at the suddenness with which I 
sprang upon my feet, and, turning some cold water into 
the reservoir, laid his hand on his breast, and looted an 
apology. The scalding was only momentary, and the 
qualified contents of the succeeding cups highly grateful. 

We were left again, for a while, to our reflections, and 
then re-appeared our attendants, with large bowls of the 
suds of scented soap, and small bunches of soft Angora 
wool. With this we were tenderly washed, and those of 
my companions who wished it were shaved. The last 
operation they described as peculiarly agreeable, both from 
the softened state of the skin and dexterity of the operators. 
Rinsed once more with warm water, our snowy turbans 
were twisted around our heads again, cloths were tied about 
our waists, and we returned to the second room. The 
transition from the excessive heat within made the air, that 
we had found oppressive when we entered, seem dis- 
agreeably chilly. We wrapped ourselves in our long cloths, 
and, resuming our carpets, took coffee and pipes as before. 
In a few minutes we began to feel a delightful glow in our 
veins, and then our cloths became unpleasantly warm, and, 
by the time we were taken back to the dressing-room, its 
cold air was a relief. They led us to the ottomans, and, 
piling the cushions so as to form a curve, laid us upon 
them, covered with clean white cloths, and, bringing us 
sherbets, lemonade, and pipes, dropped upon their knees, 
and commenced pressing our limbs all over gently with 
their hands. My sensations during the half hour that we 
lay here were indescribably agreeable. I felt an absolute 
repose of body, — a calm, half-sleepy languor in my whole 
frame, — and a tranquillity of mind, which, from the busy 
character of the scenes in which I was daily conversant, 
w r ere equally unusual and pleasurable. Scarce stirring a 
muscle or a nerve, I lay the whole hour, gazing on the 
lofty ceiling, and listening to the murmur of the fountain, 
while my silent familiar pressed my limbs with a touch as 
gentle as a child's and it seemed to me as if pleasure waa 

u 2 



^292 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

"breathing from every pore of my cleansed and softened 
skin. 1 could willingly have passed the remainder of the 
day upon the luxurious couch. I wonder less than ever 
at the flowery and poetical character of the Oriental litera- 
ture, where the mind is subjected to influences so refining 
.and exhilarating. One could hardly fail to grow a poet, I 
should think, even with this habit of Eastern luxury alone. 
If I am to conceive a romance, or to indite an epithalamiura, 
send me to the bath on a day of idleness, and, covering me 
Tip with their snowy and lavendered napkins, leave me till 

sunset ! 

* ***** 

With a dinner in prospect at a friend's house, six or 
eight miles up the Bosphorus, we started in the morning on 
foot, with the intention of seeing Sultan Mahmoud go to 
jnosque, by the way. We stopped a moment to look into 
the marble pavilion containing the clocks of the mosque of 
Tophana, and drank at the opposite pavilion, from the brass 
-cup chained in the window and supplied constantly from 
the fountain within, and then kept on through the long 
street to the first village of Dolma-baklchi, or the Garden 
of Gourds. 

Determined, with the day before us, to yield to every 
temptation on the road, we entered a small cafe overlook- 
ing a segment of the Bosphorus, and while the acorn-sized 
cups were simmering on the manghal, my friend entered 
into conversation in Arabic, with a tawny old Egyptian, 
who sat smoking in the corner. He was a fine specimen of 
the ct responsible-looking " Oriental, and had lately arrived 
from Alexandria on business. Pleasant land of the East ! 
where, to be the pink of courtesy, you must pass your snuff- 
box or your tobacco-pouch to the stranger, and ask him 
those questions of his u whereabout/' so impertinent in 
more civilised Europe. 

After a brief dialogue, which was " Ebrew " to me, our 
Alexandrian, knocking the ashes from his pipe, commenced 
a narration with a great deal of expressive gesture, at 
which my friend seemed very provokingly amused. I sipped 
my coffee, and wondered what could have led one of these 
silent gray beards into an amusing story, till a pause gave 
me an opportunity to ask a translation Hearing that we 



RAMBLE ON THE BOSPHORUS. 2QS 

were Americans, the Egyptian had begun by asking whe- 
ther there was a superstition in our country against re- 
ceiving back money in change. He explained his question 
by saying that he was in a cafe, at Tophana, when a boat's 
crew, from the American frigate, waiting for some one at 
the landing, entered, and asked for coffee. They drank it 
very quietly, and one of them gave the cafejee a dollar, 
receiving in change a handful of the shabby and adulterated 
money of Constantinople. Jack was rather surprised at 
getting a dozen cups of coffee, and so much coin for his 
dollar, and requested the boy, by signs, to treat the com- 
pany at his expense. This was done, the Turks all ac- 
knowledging the courtesy by laying their hands upon their 
foreheads and breasts, and still Jack's money lay heavy in 
his hands. He called for pipes, and they smoked a while $ 
but finding still that his riches w T ere not perceptibly dim in - 

, ished, he hitched up his trowsers, and, with a dexterous 

' flirt, threw his piastres and paras all round upon the com- 
pany, and rolled out of the cafe. From the gravity of the 
other sailors at this remarkable flourish, the old Egyptian 
and his fellow cross-legs had imagined it to be a national 
custom ! 

Idling along through the next village, we turned to 
admire a Turkish child, led by an Abyssinian slave. There 
is no country in the world where the children are so beauti- 
ful, and this w r as a cherub of a boy, like one of Domeni- 
chino's angels.' As we stopped to look at him, the little 
fellow commenced crying most lustily. 

" Hush, my rose ! " said the Abyssinian, " these are good 

1 Franks: these are not the Franks that eat children; hush!" 
It certainly takes the nonsense out of one to travel. I 
should never have thought it possible, if I had not been in 
Turkey, that I could be made a bugbear to scare a child. 

We passed the tomb of Frederick Barbarossa, getting, 
between the walls of the palaces on the water's edge, con- 
tinual and incomparable views of the Bosphorus, and arrived 
at Beshiktash, (or the marble cradle) just as the troops 
were drawn up to the door of the mosque. We took our 
stand under a plane-tree, in the midst of a crowd of women, 
and presently the noisy band struck up the sultan's march, 

rand the led horses appeared in sight. They came on with 



29* PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

their grooms and their rich housings, a dozen matchless 
Arabians, scarce touching the ground with their prancings I 
Oh, how beautiful they were ! Their delicate limbs ; their 
small, veined heads and fiery nostrils ; their glowing, in- 
telligent eyes; their quick, light, bounding action; their 
round bodies, trembling with restrained and impatient 
energy; their curved, haughty necks, and dark manes 
flowing wildly in the wind. El Borak, the mare of the 
prophet; with the wings of a bird, was not lighter or more 
'beautiful. 

The sultan followed, preceded by his principal officers, 
with a stirrup-holder running at each side, and mounted on 
a tame-looking Hungarian horse. He wore the red Fez 
cap, and a cream-coloured cloak, which covered his horse to 
the tail. His face was lowering; his firm, powerful jaw 
set in an expression of fixed displeasure, and his far-famed 
eye had a fierceness within its dark socket, from which 1 
involuntarily shrank. The women, as he came along, set 
lip a kind of howl, according to their custom, but he looked 
neither to the right nor left, and seemed totally unconscious 
of any one's existence but his own. He was quite another- 
looking man from the Mahmoud I had seen smiling in his 
handja-bash on the Bosphorus. 

As he dismounted and entered the mosque, we went on 
our way, moralising sagely on the novel subject of human 
happiness — our text, the cloud on the brow of a sultan, and 
the quiet sunshine in the bosoms of two poor pedestrians by 
the way-side. 



BiVl3 OF TO1, IT, 



VOLUME THE THIRD 



LETTER I. 



BEAUTIES OF THE BOSPHORUS SUMMER-PALACE OF THE SULTAN 

ADVENTURE WITH AN OLD TURKISH WOMAN THE FEAST OF 

BAIRAM — THE SULTAN HIS OWN BUTCHER HIS EVIL PROPEN- 
SITIES VISIT TO THE MOSQUES A FORMIDABLE DERVISH 

— SANTA SOPHIA — MOSQUE OF SULTAN ACHMET TRACES OF 

CHRISTIANITY. 

NOV. 1835. 

From this elevated point, the singular effect of a desert 
commencing from the very streets of the city is still more 
observable. The compact edge of the metropolis is visible 
even upon the more rural Bosphorus, not an inclosure or a 
straggling house venturing to protrude beyond the closely- 
pressed limit. To repeat the figure, it seems, with the 
prodigious mass of habitations on either shore, as if all the 
cities of both Europe and Asia were swept to their re- 
spective borders ; or as if the crowded masses upon the long- 
extending shores were the deposit of some mighty over- 
flow of the sea. 

From Pera commence the numerous villages, separated 
only by name, which form a fringe of peculiarly light and 
fantastic architecture to the never-wearying Bosphorus. 
Within the small limit of your eye, upon that silver link 
between the two seas, there are fifty valleys and thirty 
rivers, and an imperial palace on every loveliest spot from 
the Black Sea to Marmora. The Italians say, " See 
Naples and die !" but for Naples I would read Stamboul 
and the Bosphorus. 



296 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

Descending unwillingly from this enchanting spot, we 
entered a long glen, closed at the water's edge by the 
sultan's summer palace, and present residence of Beylerbey. 
Half-way down, we met a decrepid old woman toiling up 
the path, and my friend, with a Wordsworthian passion for 
all things humble and simple, gave her the Turkish '" Good- 
morrow," and inquired her business at the village. She 
had been to Stavros, to sell ten paras' worth of herbs — 
about one cent of our currency. He put a small piece of 
silver into her hand, while, with the still strong habit of 
Turkish modesty, she employed the other hand in folding 
her tattered yashmaclc so as to conceal her features from the 
gaze of strangers. She had not expected charity. V What 
is this for ?" she asked, looking at it with some surprise. 
" To buy bread for your children, mother !" u Effendi !" 
said the poor old creature, her voice trembling, and the 
tears streaming from her eyes, " my children are all dead! 
There is no one now between me and Allah." It were 
worth a poet's while to live in the East. Like the fairy in 
the tale, they never open their lips but they ic speak 
pearls." 

We took a caique at the mosque of Sultan Selim, at 
Beylerbey, and floated slowly past the imperial palace, 
Five or six eunuchs, with their red caps and long blue 
dresses, were talking at a high tenor in the court-yard of 
the harem, and we gazed long and earnestly at the fine 
lattices above, concealing so many of the picked beauties of 
the empire. A mandolin, very indifferently strummed in 
one of the projecting wings betrayed the employment of 
some fair Fatima, and there was a single moment when we 
could see, by the relief of a corner window, the outline of a 
female figure ; but the caique floated remorselessly on, 
and our busy imaginations had their own unreal shadows 
for their reward. As we approached the central facade the 
polished brazen gates flew open, and a band of thirty 
musicians came out and ranged themselves on the terrace 
beneath the palace-windows, announcing, in their first 
flourish, that Sultan Mahmoud had thrust his fingers into 
his pillaw, and his subjects were at liberty to dine. Not 
finding their music much to our taste, we ordered the 
caikjees to assist the current a little, and, shooting past 



FEAST OF BAIRAM. 297 

Stavros, we put across the Strait from the old palace of 

Shemsheh the visier, and in a few minutes I was once 

more in my floating home, under the €C star-spangled 

banner." 

****** 

Constantipole was in a blaze last night, with the illumi 
nation for the approach of the Turkish feast of Bairam. 
The minarets were extremely beautiful, their encircling 
galleries hung with coloured lamps, and illuminated festoons 
suspended from one to the other. The ships of the fleet 
were decked also with thousands of lamps ; and the effect 
was exceedingly fine, with the reflection in the Bosphorus, 
•and the waving of the suspended lights in the wind. The 
sultan celebrates the festa by taking a virgin to his bed, 
and sacrificing twenty sheep with his own hand. I am 
told by an intelligent physician here, that this playing the 
butcher is an every day business with the " Brother of the 
Sun," every safe return from a ride, or an excursion in his 
sultanethe caique^ requiring him to cut the throat of his 
next day's mutton. It may account partly for the excessive 
cruelty of character attributed to him. 

Among other bad traits, Mahmoud is said to be very 
avaricious. It is related of his youth, that he was per- 
mitted occasionally, with his brother, (who was murdered 
to make room for him on the throne) to walk out in. 
public on certain days with their governor ; and that, upon, 
these occasions, each was entrusted with a purse to be ex- 
pended in charity. The elder brother soon distributed his 
piastres, and borrowed of his attendants to continue his 
charities; while Mahmoud quietly put the purse in his 
pocket, and added it to his private hoard on his return. It 
is said, too, that he has a particular passion for upholstery, 
and, in his frequent change from one serai to another, 
allows no nail to be driven without his supervision. Add 
to this a spirit of perverse contradiction, so truculent that 
none but the most abject flatterers can preserve his favour, 
and you have a pretty handful of offsets against a character 

certainly not without some royal qualities. 

***** * 

With one of the Reis Effendi's and one of the Seraskier's 
officers, followed by four kervasses in the Turkish military 



298 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

dress, and every man a pair of slippers in his pocket, we 
accompanied the commodore, to-day on a visit to the 
principal mosques. 

Landing first at Tophana, on the Pera side, we entered 
the court of the new mosque built by the present sultan, 
whose elegant exterior of white marble, and two t freshly- 
gilded minarets we had admired daily, lying at anchor 
without sound of the muezzin. The morning prayers were 
just over, and the retiring Turks looked, with lowering 
brows, at us, as we pulled off our boots on the sacred 
threshold. 

We entered upon what, but for the high pulpit, I should 
have taken for rather a superb ball-room. An unencum- 
bered floor carpeted gaily ; a small arabesque gallery over 
the door quite like an orchestra 5 chandeliers and lamps in 
great profusion, and walls painted of the brightest and most 
varied colours, formed an interior rather wanting in the 
<{ dim religious light " of a place of worship. We were 
shuffling round in our slippers from one side to the other, 
examining the marble mihrab and the narrow and towering- 
pulpit, when a ragged and decrepid dervish, with his pa- 
pooshes in his hand, and his toes and heels protruding from 
a very dirty pair of stockings, rose from his prayers and 
began walking backward and forward, eyeing us ferociously 
and muttering himself into quite a passion. His charity 
for infidels was evidently at a low ebb. Every step we 
took upon the holy floor seemed to add to his fury. The 
kervasses observed him, but his sugar-loaf cap carried some 
respect with it, and they evidently did not like to meddle 
with him. He followed us to the door, fixing his hollow gray 
eyes with a deadly glare upon each one as he went out, and 
the Turkish officers seemed rather glad to hurry us out of 
his way. He left us in the vestibule, and we mounted a 
handsome marble staircase to a suite of apartments above, 
communicating with the sultan's private gallery. The 
carpets here were richer, and the divans, with which the 
half-dozen saloons were surrounded, were covered with the 
most costly stuffs of the East. The gallery was divided 
from the area of the mosque by a fine brazen grating 
curiously wrought ; and its centre occupied by a rich otto- 
man, whereon the imperial legs are crossed in the interval* 



SANTA SOPHIA. 299 

of his prostrations. It was about the size and had the air 
altogether of a private box at the Opera. 

We crossed the Golden Horn, and, passing the eunuch's 
guard, entered the gardens of the seraglio on our way to 
Santa Sophia. An inner wall still separated us from the 
gilded kiosks, at whose latticed windows, peering above 
the trees, we might have clearly perused the features of any 
peeping inmate ; but the little crossed bars revealed 
nothing but their own provoking eye of the size of a rose 
leaf in the centre, and we reached the upper gate without 
even a glimpse of a waved handkerchief to stir our chivalry 
to the rescue. 

A confused mass of buttresses without form or order, is all 
that you are shown for the exterior of that " wonder of the 
world," the mosque of mosques, the renowned Santa 
Sophia. We descended a dark avenue, and leaving our 
boots in a vestibule that the horse of Mahomet the Second, 
if he was lodged as ambitiously living as dead, would have 
disdained for his stable, we entered the vaulted area. A 
long breath and an admission of its attributed almost super- 
natural grandeur followed our too hasty disappointment. 
It is indeed a " vast and wondrous dome !" Its dimensions 
are less than those of St. Peter's at Rome, but its effect, 
owing to its unity and simplicity of design is, I think, 
superior. The numerous small galleries let into its side& 
add richness to it without impairing its apparent magnitude ; 
and its vast floor, upon which a single individual is almost 
lost, the sombre colours of its walls untouched probably for 
centuries, and the dim sepulchral light that struggles 
through the deep-niched and retiring windows, form alto- 
gether an interior from which the imagination returns, 
like the dove to the ark, fluttering and bewildered. 

Our large party separated over its wilderness of a floor, 
and each might have had his hour of solitude, had the once 
Christian spirit of the spot (or the present pagan demon) 
affected him religiously. I found, myself, a singular 
pleasure in wandering about upon the elastic mats, laid 
four or five thick all over the floor) examining here a 
tattered banner hung against the wall, and there a rich 
Cashmere which had covered the tomb of the prophet ; on 
one side a slab of transparent alabaster from the temple of 



SOO PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

Solomon, (a strange relic for a Mahometan mosque) and 
on the other a dark mihrab surrounded by candles of incre- 
dible proportions, looking like the marble columns of some 
friezeless portico. The four " six-winged cherubim " on 
the roof of the dome, sole remaining trace as they are of 
the religion to which the building was first dedicated, had 
better been left to the imagination. They are monstrous 
in mosaic. It is said that the whole interior of the mosque 
is cased beneath its dusky plaster with the same costly 
mosaic which covers the ceiling. To make a Mahometan 
mosque of a Christian church, however, it was necessary to 
erase Christian emblems from the walls ; besides which the 
Turks have a superstitious horror of all imitative arts, con- 
sidering the painting of the human features particularly, as 
a mockery of the handiwork of Allah. 

We went hence to the more modern mosque of Sultan 
Achmet, which is an imitation of Santa Sophia within, but 
its own beautiful prototype in exterior. Its spacious and 
solemn court, its six heaven-piercing minarets, its fountains 
and the mausoleums of the sultans, with their gilded cupolas 
and sarcophagi covered with Cashmeres, (the murdering 
sultan and his murdered brothers lying in equal splendour 
side by side) are of a style of richness peculiarly Oriental 
and imposing. We visited in succession Sultan Bajazet, 
Sulymanye, and Sultana Valide, all of the same arabesque 
exterior, and very similar within. The description of one 
leaves very little to be said of the other ; and with the ex- 
ception of Santa Sophia, of which I should like to make 
a lounge when I am in love with my own company, the 
mosques of Constantinople are a kind of "lion" well killed 
in a single visit. 



AREWELL TO CONSTANTINOPLE. 30' 



LETTER II. 



FAREWELL TO CONSTANTINOPLE EUROPE AND THE EAST COMPARED 

• — THE DEPARTURE SMYRNA, THE GREAT MART FOR FIGS — AN 

EXCURSION INTO ASIA MINOR TRAVELLING EQUIPMENTS — CHA- 
RACTER OF THE HAJJIS — ENCAMPMENT OF GIPSIES — A YOUTHFUL 

HEBE NOTE, HORROR OF THE TURKS FOR THE u UNCLEAN 

ANIMAL" AN ANECDOTE. 

Nov, 1835. 

I have spent the last day or two in farewell visits to ray 
favourite haunts in Constantinople. I galloped up the 
Bosphorus, almost envying les ames damnees that skim so 
swiftly and perpetually from the Symplegades to Marmora 
and from Marmora back to the Symplegades. I took a 
caique to the Valley of Sweet Waters, and rambled away 
an hour on its silken sward. I lounged a morning in the 
bazaars, smoked a parting-pipe with my old Turk in the 
Bezestein, and exchanged a last salaam, with the venerable 
Armenian bookseller, still poring over his illuminated Hafiz. 
And last night, with the sundown-boat waiting at the pier, 
I loitered till twilight in the small and elevated cemetery 
between Galata and Pera, and, with feelings of even pain- 
ful regret, gazed my last upon the matchless scene around 
me. In the words of the eloquent author of Anastasius, 
when taking the same farewell, " For the last time, my eye 
wandered over the dimpled hills, gliding along the winding 
waters, and dived into the deep and delicious dells, in which 
branch out its jagged shores. Reverting from these smiling 
outlets of its sea-beat suburbs to its busy centre, I surveyed, 
in slow succession, every chaplet of swelling cupolas, every 
grove of slender minarets, and every avenue of glittering 
porticos, whose pinnacles dart their golden shafts from be- 
tween the dark cypress-trees into the azure sky. I dwelt 
on them as on things I never was to behold more ; and not 
until the evening had deepened the veil it cast over the 
varied scene from orange to purple, and from purple to the 
sable hue of night, did I tear myself away from the impres- 
sive spot. I then bade the city of Con stan tine farewell for 
ever, descended the high-crested hill, stepped into the heav- 



302 PENC1LLINGS BY THE WAY. 

ing boat, turned my back upon the shore, and sank my 
regrets in the sparkling wave, across which the moon had 
already flung a trembling bar of silvery light, pointing my 
way, as it were, to other unknown regions." 

There are few intellectual pleasures like that of finding 
our own thoughts and feelings well described by another. 

I certainly would not live in the East ; and when I sum 
up its inconveniences and the deprivations to which the 
traveller from Europe, with his refined wants, is subjected, 
I marvel at the heart-ache with which I turn my back 
upon it, and the deep dye it has infused into my imagina- 
tion. Its few peculiar luxuries do not compensate for the 
total absence of comfort ; its lovely scenery cannot reconcile 
you to wretched lodgings ; its picturesque costumes and 
poetical people, and golden sky, fine food for a summer's 
fancy as they are, cannot make you forget the civilised 
pleasures you abandon for them — the fresh literature, the 
arts and music, the refined society, the elegant pursuits, 
and the stirring intellectual collision of the cities of 
Europe. 

Yet the world contains nothing like Constantinople. If 
we could compel all our senses into one, and live by the 
pleasure of the eye, it were a Paradise untranscended. The 
Bosphorus — the superb, peculiar, incomparable Bosphorus ! 
the dream-like, fairy-built seraglio ! the sights within the 
city so richly strange, and the valleys and streams around it 
so exquisitely fair ! the voluptuous softness of the dark eyes 
haunting your every step on shore, and the spirit-like 
swiftness and elegance of your darting caique upon the 
waters ! In what land is the priceless sight such a trea- 
sure ? Where is the fancy so delicately and divinely 
pampered ? 

Every heave at the capstan -bars drew upon my heart; 
and when the unwilling anchor, at last, let go its hold, and 
the frigate swung free with the outward current, I felt as 
if, in that moment, I had parted my hold upon a land of 
faery. The dark cypresses and golden pinnacles of Seraglio 
Point, and the higher shafts of Sophia's sky-touching mina- 
rets, were the last objects in my swiftly-receding eye, and, 
in a short hour or two, the whole bright vision had sunk 
below the horizon. 



SMYRNA. 30$ 

We crossed Marmora, and shot down the rapid Darda- 
nelles in as many hours as the passage up had occupied 
days, and, rounding the coast of Anatolia, entered between 
Mitylene and the Asian shore, and, on the third day, 
anchored in the bay of Smyrna. 

" Every body knows Smyrna/' says Mac Farlane, " it is 
suck a place for Jigs !" It is a low-built town, at the 
head of the long gulf which bears its name, and, with the 
exception of the high rock immediately over it, topped by 
the ruins of an old castle, said to embody in its walls the 
ancient Christian Church, it has no very striking features. 
Extensive gardens spread away on every side, and, without 
exciting much of your admiration for its beauty, there is a 
look of peace and rural comfort about the neighbourhood 
that affects the mind pleasantly. 

Almost immediately on my arrival, I joined a party for a 
few days' tour in Asia Minor. We were five, and, with a 
baggage-horse and a mounted suridjee, our caravan was 
rather respectable. Our appointments were Orientally 
simple. We had each a Turkish-bed, (alias, a small carpet) 
a nightcap, and a " copyhold " upon a pair of saddle-bags, 
containing certain things forbidden by the Koran, and 
therefore not likely to be found by the way. Our attendant 
was a most ill-favoured Turk, whose pilgrimage to Mecca 
(he was a hajji, and wore a green turban) had, at least, 
imparted no sanctity to his visage. If he was not a rogue, 
nature had mislabelled him, and I shelter my want of 
charity under the Arabic proverb : " Distrust thy neighbour 
if he has made a hajji ; if he has made two, make haste to 
leave thy house." 

We found our way slowly out of the narrow and ill- 
paved streets of Smyrna, and passing through the suburban 
gardens, yellow with lemons and oranges, crossed a small 
bridge over the Hermus. This is a favourite walk of the 
Smerniotes; and if its classic river, whose " golden sands" 
(here at least) are not golden, and its ei Bath of Diana" 
near by, whose waters would scarcely purify her (i silver 
bow," are something less than their sounding names, there 
is a cool, dark cemetery beyond, less famous, but more prac- 
ticable for sentiment, and many a shadowy vine and droop- 
ing tree in the gardens around, that might recompense 



b> 



304 PENCILLLNGS BY THE WAY. 

lovers, perhaps, for the dirty labyrinth of the intervening 
suburb. 

We spurred away over the long plain of Hadjilar, leaving 
to the right and left the pretty villages ornamented by the 
summer-residences of the wealthy merchants of Smyrna, 
and in two or three hours reached a small lone cafe, 'at the 
foot of its bounding range of mountains. We dismounted 
here to breathe our horses, and, while coffee was preparing 
J discovered, in a green hollow hard by, a small encamp 
ment of gipsies. With stones in our hands, as the cqfejee 
told us the dogs were troublesome, we walked down into 
the little round-bottomed dell, a spot selected with "a 
lover's eye for nature," and were brought to bay by a 
dozen noble shepherd-dogs, within a few yards of their 
outer tent. 

The noise brought out an old sun-burnt woman, and two 
or three younger ones, with a troop of boys, who called in 
the dogs, and invited us kindly within their limits. The 
tents were placed in a half-circle, with their doors inward, 
and were made with extreme neatness. There were eight 
or nine of them, very small and low, with round tops, the 
cloth stretched tightly over an inner frame, and bound 
curiously down on the outside with beautiful wicker-work. 
The curtains at the entrance were looped up to admit the 
grateful sun, and the compactly arranged interiors lay open 
to our prying curiosity. In the rounded corner farthest 
from the door lay uniformly the same goat-skin beds, flat 
on the ground ; and in the centre of most of them stood a 
small loom, at which the occupant plied her task like an 
automaton, not betraying by any sign a consciousness of 
our presence. They sat cross-legged like the Turks, and 
had all a look of habitual sternness, which, with their thin, 
strongly-marked gipsy features, and wild eyes, gave them 
more the appearance of men. It was the first time I had 
ever remarked such a character upon a class of female faces, 
and 1 should have thought I had mistaken their sex if their 
half-naked figures had not put it beyond a doubt. The 
men were probably gone to Smyrna, as none were visible in 
the encampment. As we were about returning, the curtain 
of the largest tent, which had been dropped on our entrance, 
was lifted cautiously by a beautiful girl, of perhaos thirteen, 



EASTERN GIPSIES. 305 

who, not remarking that I was somewhat in the rear of my 
companions, looked after them a moment, and then, fasten- 
ing back the dingy folds by a string, returned to her em- 
ployment of swinging an infant in a small wicker hammock, 
suspended in the centre of the tent. Her dark but prettily- 
rounded arm was decked with a bracelet of silver pieces ; 
and just between two of the finest eyes I ever saw, was 
suspended, by a yellow thread, one of the small gold coins 
of Constantinople. Her softly moulded bust was entirely 
bare, and might have served for the model of a youthful 
Hebe. A girdle around her waist sustained loosely a lon^ 
pair of full Turkish trowsers, of the colour and fashion 
usually worn by women in the East, and, caught over her 
hip, hung suspended by its fringe the truant shawl that 
had been suffered to fall from her shoulders and expose her 
guarded beauty. I stood admiring her a full minute, before 
I observed a middle-aged woman in the opposite corner, 
w T ho, bending over her work, was fortunately as late in 
observing my intrusive presence. As I advanced half a 
step, however, my shadow fell into the tent, and, starting 
with surprise, she rose and dropped the curtain. 

We re-mounted, and I rode on, thinking of the vision of 
loveliness I was leaving in that wild dell. We travel a 
great way to see hills and rivers, thought I, but, after all, 
a human being is a more interesting object than a moun- 
tain. I shall remember "the little gipsy of Hadjilar long 
after I have forgotten Hermus and Sipylus. 

Our road dwindled to a mere bridle-path as we advanced, 
and the scenery grew wild and barren. The horses were 
all sad stumblers, and the uneven rocks gave them every 
apology for coming down whenever they could forget the 
spur ; and so we entered the broad and green valley of 
Yackerhem, (I write it as I heard it pronounced,) and drew 
up at the door of a small hovel, serving the double purpose 
of a cafe and a guard-house. 

A Turkish officer of the old regime, turbaned and cross- 
legged, and armed with pistols and ataghan, sat smoking on 
one side the brazier of coals, and the cqfejee exercised his 
small vocation on the other. Before the door, a raised plat- 
form of green sward, and a marble slab facing toward 
Mecca, indicated the place for prayer ; and a dashing rider 

x 



306 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

of a Turk, who had kept us company from Smyrna, flying 
past us and dropping to the rear alternately, had taken off 
his slippers at the moment we arrived, and was commencing 
his noon devotions. 

We gathered round our commissary's saddle-bags, and 
shocked our mussulman friends by producing the unclean 
beast* and the forbidden liquor, which, with the delicious 
Turkey coffee, never better than in these wayside hovels, 
furnished forth a traveller's meal. 



LETTER III. 



NATURAL STATUE OF NIOBE THE THORN OF SYRIA AND ITS TRA- 
DITION APPROACH TO MAGNESIA HEREDITARY RESIDENC 

OF THE FAMILY OF BEY-OGLOU — CHARACTER OF ITS PRESEN 

OCCUPANT THE TRUTH ABOUT ORIENTAL CARAVANSERAIS 

COMFORTS AND APPLIANCES THEY YIELD TO TRAVELLERS 

FIGA.RO OF THE TURKS — THE PILLAW MORNING SCENE AT THE 

DEPARTURE PLAYFUL FAMILIARITY OF A SOLEMN OLD TURK 

MAGNIFICENT PROSPECT FROM MOUNT SYPYLUS. 



A" 

CE 

NT 



Not. 1833. 

Three or four hours more of hard riding brought us to a 
long glen, opening upon the broad plains of Lydia. We 
were on the look-out here for the (i natural statue of Niobe," 
spoken of by the ancient writers as visible from the road in 
this neighbourhood ; but there was nothing that looked like 
her, unless she was, as the poet describes her, a " Niobe, all 
tears/' and runs down toward the Sarabat, in what we 
took to be only a very pretty mountain rivulet. It served 
for simple fresh water to our volunteer companion, who 
darted off an hour before sunset, and had finished his ab- 
lutions and prayers, and was rising from his knees as we 

* Talking of hams, two of the sultan's chief eunuchs applied to an English 
physician, a friend of mine, at Constantinople, to accompany them on board the 
American frigate. I engaged to wait on board for them on a certain day, but they 
did not make their appearance. They gave, as their apology, that they could not 
defile themselves by entering a ship polluted by the presence of that unclean 
animal, the hog. 



MAGNESIA. 307 

overtook liim upon its grassy border. Almost the only 
thing that grows in these long mountain-passes is the pecu- 
liar thorn of Syria, said to be the same of which our Saviour's 
crown was plaited. It differs from the common species in 
having a hooked thorn alternating with the straight, adding 
cruelly to its power of laceration. It is remarkable that the 
flower, at this season withering on the bush, is a circular 
golden-coloured leaf, resembling exactly the radiated glory 
usually drawn around the heads of Christ and the Virgin. 

Amid a sunset of uncommon splendour, firing every peak 
of the opposite range of hills with an effulgent red, and 
filling the valley between with an atmosphere of heavenly 
purple, we descended into the plain. 

Mount Sipylus, in whose rocks the magnetic ore is said 
to have been first discovered, hung over us in bold precipices; 
and, rounding a projecting spur, we came suddenly in sight 
of the minarets and cypresses of Magnesia, (not pronounced 
as if written in an apothecary's bill) the ancient capital of 
the Ottoman empire. 

On the side of the ascent, above the town, we observed 
a large isolated mansion, surrounded with a wall, and 
planted about with noble trees, looking, with the exception 
that it was too freshly painted, like one of the fine old 
castle-palaces of Italy. It was something very extraordinary 
for the East, where no man builds beyond the city wall, 
and no house is very much larger than another. It was 
the hereditary residence, we afterward discovered, of almost 
the only noble family in Turkey — that of the Bey-Oglou. 
You will recollect Byron's allusion to it in the ' Bride of 
Abydos : ' 

" We Moslem reck not much of blood, 
But yet the race of Karaisman, 
Unchanged, unchangeable hath stood, 

First of the bold Timareot bands 
Who won, and well can keep, their lands ; 
Enough that he who comes to woo 
Is kinsman of the Bey-Oglou.'' 

I quote from memory ; perhaps incorrectly. 

The present descendant is still in possession of the title, 
and is said to be a liberal-minded* and hospitable old Turk, 
of the ancient and better school. His camels are the finest 

\ 2 



dOS PENCrilliNGS BY THE WAV. 

chat come into Smyrna, and are famous for their beauty and 
appointments. 

Our devout companion left us at the first turning in the 
town, laying his hand to his breast in gratitude for having 
been suffered to annoy us all day with his brilliant, equita- 
tion, and we stumbled in through the increasing shadows of 
twilight to the caravanserai. 

It is very possible that the reader has but a slender con- 
ception of an Oriental hotel. Supposing it, at least, from 
the inadequacy of my own previous ideas, I shall allow 
myself a little particularity in the description of the con- 
veniences which the travelling Zuleikas and Fatimas, the 
Maleks and Othmans, of Eastern story, encounter in their 
romantic journeys. 

It was near the farther outskirt of the large city of Mag- 
nesia, (the accent, I repeat, is on the penult,) that we found 
the way encumbered with some scores of kneeling camels, 
announcing our vicinity to a khan. A large wooden build- 
ing, rather off its perpendicular, with a great many win- 
dows, but no panes in them, and only here and there a 
shutter hanging by the eyelids, presently appeared ; and 
entering its hospitable gateway, which had neither gate nor 
porter, we dismounted in a large court, lit only by the 
stars, and pre-occupied by any number of mules and horses. 
An inviting staircase led to a gallery encircling the whole 
area, from which opened thirty or forty small doors ; but, 
though we made as much noise as could be expected of as 
many men and horses, no waiter looked over the balustrade, 
nor maid Cicely, nor Boniface, or their corresponding re- 
presentatives in Turkey, invited us in. The suridjee looked 
to his horses, which was his business, and to look to our- 
selves was ours ; though, with our stiff limbs and clamorous 
appetites, we set about it rather despairingly. 

The Figaro of the Turks is a cafejee, who besides 
shaving, making coffee, and bleeding, is supposed to be 
capable of every office required by man. He is generally a 
Greek, the Mussulman seldom having sufficient facility of 
character for the vocation. In a few minutes, then, the 
nearest Figaro was produced, who scarce dissembling his 
surprise at the improvidence of travellers who went about 
without pot or kettle, bag of rice or bottle of oil, led the 



AN ORIENTAL HOTEL. 309 

way with his primitive lamp to our appointment. We 
might have our choice of twenty. Having looked at the 
other nineteen, we came back to the first, reconciled to it 
by sheer force of comparison. Of its two windows one 
alone had a shutter that would fulfil its destiny. It con- 
tained, neither chair, table, nor utensil of any description. 
Its floor had not been swept, nor its walls whitewashed 
since the days of Timour the Tartar. " Kalo ! Kalo I" 
(Greek for ic you will be very comfortable,") cried our 
commissary, throwing down some old mats to spread our 
carpets upon. But the mats were alive with vermin, and, 
for sweeping the room, the dust would not have been laid 
till midnight. So we threw down our carpets upon the 
floor, and driving from our minds the two luxurious 
thoughts of clean straw, and a corner in a warm barn, sat 
down, by the glimmer of a flaring taper, to wait, with what 
patience we might, for a chicken still breathing freely on 
his roost, and turn our backs as ingeniously as possible on a 
chilly December wind, that came in at the open window, as 
if it knew the caravanserari were free to all comers. There 
is but one circumstance to add to this faithful description 
— and it is one which, in the minds of many very worthy 
persons, would turn the scale in favour of the hotels of the 
East, with all their disadvantages — there was nothing to pay ! 
Ali Bey, in his travels, predicts the fall of the Ottoman 
empire, from the neglected state of the khans ; this inatten- 
tion to the public institutions of hospitality being a falling 
away from the leading Mussulman virtue. They never 
gave the traveller more than a shelter, however, in their 
best day's; and to enter a cold, unfurnished room after a 
days hard travel, even if the floor were clean, and the 
windows would shut, is rather comfortless. Yet such is 
Eastern travel, and the alternative is to take " the sky for 
a great-coat," and find as soft a stone as possible for your 
pillow. 

We gathered around our pillaw, which came in the pro- 
gress of time, and consisted of a chicken, buried in a hand- 
somely-shaped cone of rice and butter, forming, with the 
large crater-like black bowl in which it stood, the cloud of 
smoke issuing from its peak, and the lava of butter flowing 
dov/n its sides, as pretty a miniature Vesuvius as you would 



310 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

find in a modeller's window in the Toledo. Encouraging 
that sin in Christians, which they would not commit them- 
selves, they brought us some wine of the country, the sin 
of drinking which, one would think, was its own sufficient 
punishment. With each a wooden spoon, the immediate 
and only means of communication between the dish and the 
mouth, we soon solved the doubtful problem of the depth 
of the crater ; and then casting lots who should lie next 
the window to take off the edge of the December blast, we 
improved upon some hints taken from the fig-packers of 
Smyrna, and with an economy of exposed surface, which 
can only be learned by travel, disposed ourselves in a solid 
body to sleep. 

The tinkling of the camels' bells awoke me as the day 
was breaking, and, my toilet being already made, I sprang 
readily up and descended to the court of the caravanserai. 
It was an Eastern scene, and not an unpoetical one. The 
patient and intelligent camels were kneeling in regular 
ranks to receive their loads, complaining in a voice almost 
human, as the driver flung the heavy bales upon the saddles 
too roughly ; while the small donkey, no larger than a 
Newfoundland dog, leader of the long caravan, took his 
place at the head of the gigantic file, pricking back his long 
ears as if he were counting his spongy-footed followers, as 
they fell in behind him. Here and there knelt six or seven, 
with their unsightly humps still unburdened, eating with 
their peculiar deliberateness from small heaps of provender, 
and, scattered over the adjacent field, wandered separately 
the caravan of some indolent driver, browsing upon the 
shrubs, and looking occasionally with intelligent expectation 
toward the khan, for the appearance of their tardy master. 
Overall rose the mingled music of the small bells, with 
which their gay-coloured harness was profusely covered, 
varied by the heavy beat of the larger ones borne at the 
necks of the leading and last camels of the tile, while the 
retreating sounds of the caravans already on their march, 
came in with the softer tones which completed its 
sweetness. 

In a short time my companions joined me, and we started 
for a walk in the town. The necessity of attending the 
daylight prayers makes all Mussulmans early risers, and we 



PLAIN OF MAGNESIA. 31 1 

found the streets already crowded, and the merchants and 
artificers as busy as at noon. Turning a corner to get out 
of the way of a row of butchers, who were slaughtering 
sheep revoltingly in front of their stalls, we met two old 
Turks coming from the mosque, one of whom, with the 
familiarity of manners which characterizes the nation, took 
from my hand a stout English riding- whip which I carried, 
and began to exercise it on the bag-like trowsers of his 
friend. After amusing himself a while in this manner, he 
returned the whip, and, patting me condescendingly on the 
cheek, gave me two Jigs from his voluminous pocket, and 
walked on. Considering that I stand six feet in my 
stockings, an unwieldy size, you may say, for a pet, this 
freak of the old Magnesian would seem rather extraordinary. 
Yet it illustrates the Turkish manners, which, as I have 
often had occasion to notice, are a singular mixture of pro- 
found gravity and the most childish simplicity. 

We found a few fine old marble columns in the porches 
of the mosques, but one Turkish town is just like another, 
and after an hour or two of wandering about among the 
wooden houses and narrow streets, we returned to the 
khan, and with a cup of coffee, mounted and resumed our 
journey. 

I have never seen a finer plain than that of Magnesia. 
With an even breadth of seven or eight miles, its length 
cannot be less than fifty or sixty, and throughout its whole 
extent it is one unbroken picture of fertile field and meadow, 
shut in by two lofty ranges of mountains, and watered by 
the full and winding Hermus. Without fence, and almost 
without human habitation, it is a noble expanse to the eye, 
possessing all the untrammelled beauty of a wilderness 
without its detracting inutility. It is literally " clothed 
with flocks/' As we rode on under the eastern brow of 
Mount Sipylus, and struck out more into the open plain, as 
far as we could distinguish by the eye, spread the snowy 
sheep in hundreds, at merely separating distances, checkered 
here and there by a herd of the tall jet-black goats of the 
East, walking onward in slow and sober procession, with 
the solemn state of a funeral. The road was lined with 
camels coming into Smyrna by this grand highway of 
nature, and bringing all the varied produce of Asia Minor 



312 PEXCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

to barter in its busy mart. We must have passed a 
thousand in our day's journey. 



LETTER IV. 

THE EYE OF THE CAMEL ROCKY SEPULCHRES — VIRTUE OF AN 

OLD PASSPORT BACKED BY IMPUDENCE TEMPLE OF CYBELE 

PALACE OF CROESUS — ANCIENT CHURCH OF SARDIS — RETURN 
TO SMYRNA. 

Unsightly as the camel is, with its long snaky neck, its 
frightful hump, and its awkward legs and action, it wins 
much upon your kindness with a little acquaintance. Its 
eye is exceeding fine. There is a lustrous, suffused softness 
in the large hazel orb that is the rarest beauty in a human 
eye, and so remarkable is this feature in the camel, that I 
wonder it has never fallen into use as a poetical simile. 
They do not shun the gaze of man, like other animals, and 
I pleased myself often, when the suridjee slackened his 
pace, with riding close to some returning caravan, and ex- 
changing steady looks in passing with the slow -paced 
camels. It was like meeting the eye of a kind old man. 

The face of Mount Sipylus, in its whole extent, is exca- 
vated into sepulchres. They are mostly ancient, and form a 
very singular feature in the scenery. A range of precipices, 
varying from one to three hundred feet in height, is perfo- 
rated for twenty miles with these airy depositaries for the 
dead, many of them a hundred feet from the plain. Oc- 
casionally they are extended to considerable caves, hewn 
with great labour in the rock, and probably, from their 
numerous niches, intended as family sepulchres. They are 
now the convenient eyries of great numbers of eagles, 
which circle continually around the summits, and poise 
themselves on the wing along the sides of these lonely 
mountains in undisturbed security. 

We arrived early in the afternoon at Casabar, a pretty 
town at the foot of Mount Tmolus. Having eaten a 
melon, the only thing for which the place is famous, we 



VIKTUE OF AN OLD PASSPORT. 313 

proposed to go on to Achmet-lee, some three hours farther. 
The suridjee, however, whose horses were hired by the day, 
had made up his mind, to sleep at Casabar; and so we were 
at issue. Our stock of Turkish was soon exhausted, and 
the hajji was coolly unbuckling the girths of the baggage- 
horse, without condescending even to answer our appeal 
with a look. The Mussulman idlers of the cafe opposite 
took their pipes from their mouths and smiled. The gay 
cafejee went about his arrangements for our accommodation, 
quite certain that we were there for the night. I had 
given up the point myself, when one of my companions, 
with a look of the most confident triumph, walked up to 
the suridjee, and, tapping him on the shoulder, held before 
his eyes a paper with the seal of the pasha of Smyrna in 
broad characters at the top. After the astonished Turk had 
looked at it for a- moment, he commenced in good round 
English and poured upon him a volume of incoherent 
rhapsody, slapping the paper violently with his hand and 
pointing to the road. The effect was instantaneous. The 
girth was hastily rebuckled, and the frightened suridjee put 
his hand to his head in token of submission, mounted in the 
greatest hurry, and rode out of the court of the caravanserai. 
The cafejee made his salaam, and the spectators wished us 
respectfully a good journey. The magic paper was an old 
passport, and our friend had calculated securely on the 
natural dread of the incomprehensible, quite sure that there 
was not more than one man in the village that could read, 
and none short of Smyrna who could understand his 
English. 

The plain between Casabar and Achmet-lee is quite a 
realisation of poetry. It is twelve miles of soft, bright 
green- sward, broken only with clumps of luxuriant 
oleanders, an occasional cluster of the " black tents of 
Kedar " with their flocks about them, and here and there 
a loose and grazing camel indolently lifting his broad foot 
from the grass as if he felt the coolness and verdure to its 
spongy core. One's heart seems to stay behind as he rides 
onward through tmch places. 

The village of Achmet-lee consists of a coffee-house with 
a single room. We arrived about sunset, and found the 
fire-place surrounded by six or seven Turks, squatted on 
their hams, travellers like ourselves, who had arrived before 



314 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

us. There was fortunately a second fireplace, which was 
soon blazing with fagots of fig and oleander, and, with a 
pillarv between us, we crooked our tired legs under us on 
the earthen floor, and made ourselves as comfortable as a 
total absence of every comfort would permit. The mingled 
smoke of tobacco and the chimney drove me out of doors as 
soon as our greasy meal was finished, and the contrast was 
enough to make one in love with nature. The moon was 
quite full, and pouring her light down through the trans- 
parent and dazzling sky of the East with indescribable 
splendour. The fires of twenty or thirty caravans were 
blazing in the fields around, and the low cries of the camels, 
and the hum of voices from the various groups, were 
mingled with the sound of a stream that came noisily 
down its rocky channel from the nearest spur of Mount 
Tmolus. I walked up and down the narrow camel-path 
till midnight ; and if the kingly spirits of ancient Lydia 
did not keep me company in the neighbourhood of their 
giant graves, it was perhaps because the feet that trod down 
their ashes came from a world of which Croesus and 
Abyattis never heard. The sin of late rising is seldom 
chargeable upon an earthen bed, and we were in the saddle 
by sunrise, breathing an air that, after our smoky cabin, 
was like a spice- wind from Arabia. Winding round the 
base of the chain of mountains which we had followed for 
twenty or thirty miles, we ascended a little, after a brisk 
trot of two or three hours, and came in sight of the citadel 
of ancient Sardis, perched like an eagle's nest on the summit 
of a slender rock. A natural terrace, perhaps a hundred 
feet above the plain, expanded from the base of the hill, 
and this was the commanding site of the capital of Lydia. 
Dividing us from it ran the classic and " golden-sanded " 
Pactolus, descending from the mountains in a small, narrow 
valley, covered with a verdure so fresh, that it requires 
some power of fancy to realise that a crowded empire ever 
swarmed on its borders. Crossing the small, bright stream, 
we rode along the other bank, winding up its ascending 
curve, and dismounted at the ruins of the Temple of Cybele, 
a heap of gigantic fragments strown confusedly over the 
earth, with two majestic columns rising lone and beautiful 
into the air. 

A Dutch artist, who was of our party, spread his 






ANCIENT SARDIS. 31 & 

drawing-board and pencils upon one of the fallen Ionic 
capitals ; the suridjee tied his horses' heads together, and 
laid himself at his length upon the grass, and the rest of us 
ascended the long steep hill to the citadel. With some loss 
of breath, and a battle with the dogs of a gipsy encapment, 
hidden so as almost to be invisible among the shrubbery of 
the hill-side, we stood at last upon a peak, crested with one 
tottering remnant of a wall, the remains of a castle, whose 
foundations have crumbled beneath it. It looks as if the 
next rain must send the w r hole mass into the valley. 

It puzzled my unmilitary brain to conceive how Alex- 
ander and his Macedonians climbed these airy precipices, if 
taking the citadel was a part of his conquest of Lydia. 
The fortifications in the rear have a sheer descent from 
their solid walls of two or three hundred perpendicular feet, 
with scarce a vine clinging by the way. I left my 
companions discussing the question, and walked to the other 
edge of the hill, overlooking the immense plains below. 
The tumuli which mark the sepulchres of the kings of 
Lydia rose like small hills on the opposite and distant bank 
of the Hermus. The broad fields, which were once the 
" wealth of Crcesus," lay still fertile and green aong the 
banks of their historic river. Thyatira and Philadelphia 
were almost within reach of my eye, and I stood upon 
Sardis — in the midst of the sites of the Seven Churches. 
Below lay the path of the myriad armies of Persia, on their 
march to Greece : here Alexander pitched his tents after 
the battle of Granicus, whiling away the winter in the lap 
of captive Lydia ; and over the small ruin just discernible 
on the southern bank of the Pactolus, (S the angel of the 
church of Sardis " brooded with his protecting wings, till 
the few who had " not defiled their garments " were called 
to " walk in white," in the promised reward of the 
Apocalypse. 

We descended again to the Temple of Cybele, and mounting 
our horses rede down to the Palace of Crcesus. Parts of 
the outer walls, the bases of the portico, and the marble 
steps of an inner court, are all that remain of the splendour 
that Solon was called upon in vain to admire. With the 
permission of six or seven storks, whose coarse nests were 
built upon the highest points of the ruins, we selected the 



31 6 PENCILL1NGS BY THE WAY. 

broadest of the marble blocks lying in the deserted area, 
and spreading our travellers' breakfast upon it, forgot even 
the kingly builder in our well-earned appetites. 

There are three parallel walls remaining of the ancient 
church of Sardis. They stand on a gentle slope, just 
above the edge of the Pactolus, and might easily be rebuilt 
into a small chapel, with only the materials within them. 
There are many other ruins on the site of the city, but 
none designated by a name. We loitered about, collecting 
relics, and indulging our fancies, till the suridjee reminded 
us of the day's journey before us ; and with a drink from 
the Pactolus, and a farewell look at the beautiful Ionic 
columns standing on its lonely bank, we put spurs to our 
horses and galloped once more down into the valley. 

Our Turkish saddles grew softer on the third day's 
journey, and we travelled more at ease. I found the free- 
dom and solitude of the wide and unfenced country growing 
at every mile more upon my liking. The heart expands as 
one gives his horse the rein and gallops over these wild 
paths without toll-gate or obstacle. I can easily understand 
the feeling of Ali Bey on his return to Europe from the 
East. 

Our fourth day's journey lay through the valley between 
Tmolus and Semering — the fairest portion of the dominions 
of Timour the Tartar. How gracefully shaped were those 
slopes to the mountains ! How bright the rivers ! 
How green the banks ! How like a new created and still 
unpeopled world it seemed, with every tree and flower and 
fruit, the perfect model of its kind ! 

Leaving the secluded village of Nymphi nested in the 
mountains on our left, as we approached the end of our 
circuitous journey, we entered early in the afternoon the 
long plains of Hadjilar, and with tired horses and (malgre 
romance) an agreeable anticipation of Christian beds and 
supper, we dismounted in Smyrna at sunset. 



THE SMYRNIOTES. 31 



LETTER V. 

UYItJSA — CHARMS OF ITS SOCIETY — HOSPITALITY OF FOREIGN 

RESIDENTS THE MARINA THE CASINO — A NARROW ESCAPE 

FROM THE PLAGUE —DEPARTURE OF THE FRIGATE — AMERICAN 

NAVY A TRIBUTE OF RESPECT AND GRATITUDE THE 

FAREWELL. 

Dec. 1833. 

What can I say of Smyrna? Its mosques and bazaars 
scarce deserve description after those of Constantinople. It 
has neither pictures, scenery, nor any peculiarities of 
costume or manners. There are no " lions " here. It is 
only one of the most agreeable places in the world, exactly 
the sort of thing that (without compelling private indi- 
viduals to sit for their portraits,)* is the least describable. 
Of the fortnight of constant pleasure that I have passed 
here, I do not well know how I can eke out half a page 
that would amuse you. 

The society of Smyrna has some advantages over that of 
any other city I have seen. It is composed entirely of the 
families of merchants, who, separated from the Turkish in- 
habitants occupy a distinct quarter of the town, are respons- 
ible only to their consuls, and having no nobility above, 
and none but dependents below them, live in a state of 
cordial republican equality that is not found even in 
America. They are of all nations, and the principal lan- 
guages of Europe are spoken by every body. Hospitality is 
carried to an extent more like the golden age than these 
•Mays of iron ; ' and, as a necessary result of the free mix- 
ture of languages and feelings, there is a degree of informa- 

* A courteous old traveller, of the last century, whose book I have somewhere 
fallen in with, indulges his recollections of Smyrna with less scruple. " Mrs. B.' 
he says " who has travelled a great deal, is mistress of both French and Italian. 
The Misses W, are all amiable young ladies. A Miss A., whose name is expressive 
of the passion she inspires, without being beautiful, possesses a Je ne sqais qtioi, 
which fascinates more than beauty itself. Not to love her, one must never have 
seen her. And who would not be captivated by the vivacity of Miss B. ?" How 
charming thus to go about the world, describing the fairest of its wonders, instead 
of stupid mountains and rivers ' 



318 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

tion and liberality of sentiment among them, united to a 
free and joyous tone of manners and habits of living, that 
is quite extraordinary in men of their care-fraught pro- 
fession. Our own country, I am proud to say, js most 
honourably represented. There is no traveller to the East 
of any nation, who does not carry away with him from 
Smyrna grateful recollections of one at least whose hospi- 
tality is as open as his gate. This living over warehouses 
x)f opium, I am inclined to think, is healthy for the heart. 

After having seen the packing of figs ; wondered at the 
enormous burdens carried by the porters ; ridden to Bougiar 
and the castle on the hill, and admired the caravan of the 
Bey-Oglou, whose camels are, certainly, the handsomest 
that come into Smyrna, one has nothing to do but dine, 
dance, and walk on the Marina. The last is a circumstance 
the traveller does well not to miss. A long street extends 
along the bay, lined with the houses of the rich merchants 
of the town, and for the two hours before sunset, every 
family is to be seen sitting outside its door upon the public 
pavement, while beaux and belles stroll up and down in all 
the gaiety of perpetual holiday. They are the most out-of- 
doors people, the Smyrniotes, that I have ever seen. And 
one reason perhaps is, that they have a beauty which has 
nothing to fear from the daylight. The rich, classic, glow- 
ing faces of the Greeks, the paler and livelier French, the 
serious and impassioned Italian, the blooming English, and 
the shrinking and fragile American, mingle together in this 
concourse of grace and elegance like the varied flowers in 
the garden. I would match Smyrna against the world for 
beauty. And then such sociability, such primitive cordiality 
of manners as you find among them ! It is quite a Utopia. 
You would think that little republic of merchants, separate 
from the Christian world on a heathen shore, had com- 
menced de novo, from Eden — ignorant as yet of jealousy, 
envy, suspicion, and the other ingredients with which the 
old world mingles up its refinements. It is a very pleasant 
place, Smyrna. 

The stranger, on his arrival, is immediately introduced to 
the Casino — a large palace, supported by the subscription of 
the residents, containing a reading-room furnished with all 
the gazettes and reviews of Europe, a ball-room frequently 



THE CASINO. 319 

used, a coffee-room whence the delicious mocha is brought 
to you whenever you enter, billiard- tables, card-rooms, &c. 
&c. The merchants are all members, and any member can 
introduce a stranger, and give him all the privileges of the 
place during his stay in the city. It is a courtesy that is 
not a little drawn upon. English, French, and American 
ships of war are almost always in the port, and the officers 
are privileged guests. Every traveller to the East passes 
by Smyrna, and there are always numbers at the Casino. 
In fact, the hospitality of this kindest of cities has not the 
usual demerit of being rarely called upon. It seems to have 

grown with the demand for it. 

****** 

Idling away the time very agreeably at Smyrna, waiting 
for a vessel to go — I care not where. I have offered myself 
as a passenger in the first ship that sails. I rather lean 
toward Palestine and Egypt, but there are no vessels for 
Jaffa or Alexandria. A brig, crowded with hajjis to Jeru- 
salem, sailed on the first day of my arrival at Smyrna, and 
I was on the point of a hasty embarkation, when my good 
angel, in the shape of a sudden caprice, sent me off to 
Sardis. The plague broke out on board immediately on 
leaving the port, and nearly the whole ship's company 
perished at sea ! 

There are plenty of vessels bound to Trieste and the 
United States, but there would be nothing new to me in 
Illyria and Lombardy ; and much as I love my country, I 
am more enamoured for the present of my " sandal-shoon." 
Besides, I have a yearning to the south, and the cold 
" Bora " of that bellows-like Adriatic, and the cutting 
winter winds of my native shore, chill me even in the 
thought. Meantime I breathe an air borrowed by Decem- 
ber of May, and sit with my windows open, warming ray- 
self in a broad beam of the soft sun of Asia. With such 

" appliances " even suspense is agreeable. 

****** 

The commodore sailed this morning for his winter-quar- 
ters in Minorca. I watched the ship's preparations for de- 
parture from the balcony of the hotel, with a heavy heart. 
Her sails dropped from the yards, her head turned slowly 
outward as the anchor brought away, and with a light 



820 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

breeze in her topsails the gallant frigate moved majestically 
down the harbour, and in an hour was a speck on the 
horizon. She had been my home for more than six months. 
I had seen from her deck, and visited in her boats, some of 
the fairest portions of the world. She had borne, me to 
Sicily, to Illyria, to the Isles and shore of Greece, to Mar- 
mora and the Bosphorus ; and the thousand lovely pictures 
with which that long summer voyage had stored my 
memory, and the thousand adventures and still more nume- 
rous kindnesses and courtesies, linked with these interesting 
scenes, crowded on my mind as the noble ship receded from 
ray eye, with an emotion that I could not repress. 

There is a " pomp and circumstance " about a man-of- 
war, which is exceedingly fascinating. Her imposing struc- 
ture and appearance ; the manly and deferential etiquette ; 
the warlike appointment and impressive order upon her 
decks : the ready and gallantly manned boat ; the stirring 
music of the band, and the honour and attention with which 
her officers are received in every port, conspire in keeping 
awake an excitement, a kind of chivalrous elation, which, it 
seems to me, would almost make a hero of a man of straw 
From the hoarse " seven bells. Sir ! " with which you are 
turned out of your hammock in the morning, to the blast 
of the bugle and the report of the evening gun, it is one 
succession of elevating sights and sounds, without any of 
that approach to the ridiculous which accompanies the 
sublime or the impressive on shore. 

From the comparisons 1 have made between our own 
and the ships of war of other nations, I think we may well 
be proud of our navy. I had learned in Europe, long 
before joining the ' United States," that the respect we 
exact from foreigners is paid more to America afloat, than 
to a continent they think as far off at least as the moon. 
They see our men-of-war, and they know very well what 
they have done, and from the appearance and character of 
our officers, what they might do again — and there is a tan- 
gibility in the deductions from knowledge and eye-sight, 
which beats books and statistics. I have heard Englishmen 
deny, one by one, every claim we have to political and 
moral superiority j but I have found no one illiberal enough 
to refuse a compliment, and a handsome one, to Yankee ships. 



COMMODORE PATTERSON. 321 

I consider, myself, I repeat, particularly fortunate to have 
made a cruise on board an American frigate. It is a chap- 
ter of observation in itself, which is worth much to any one. 
But, in addition to this, it was my good fortune to have 
happened upon a cruise directed by a mind full of taste and 
desire for knowledge, and a cruise which had for its princi- 
pal objects improvement and information. Commodore 
Patterson knew the ground well, and was familiar with the 
history and localities of the interesting countries visited by 
the ship ; and every possible facility and encouragement 
was given by him to all to whom the subjects and places 
were new. An enlightened and enterprising traveller him- 
self, he was the best of advisers and the best and kindest of 
guides. I take pleasure in recording almost unlimited obli- 
gations to him. 

And so, to the gallant ship — to the " warlike world 
within " — to the decks I have so often promenaded, and the 
moonlight watches I have so often shared — to the groups 
of manly faces I have learned to know so well — to the 
drum-beat and the bugle-call, and the stirring music of the 
band — to the hammock in which I swung and slept so 
soundly — and last and nearest my heart, to the gay and 
hospitable mess with whom for six happy months I have 
been a guest and a friend, whose feelings I have learned but 
to honour my country more, and whose society has become 
to me even a painful want — to all this catalogue of happi- 
ness, I am bidding a heavy-hearted farewell. Luck and 
Heaven's blessing to ship and company ! 



LETTER VI. 
MILAN. 

JOURNEY THROUGH ITALY BOLOGNA MALIBRAN — PARMA 

NIGHTINGALES OF LOMBARDY — PIACENZA AUSTRIAN SOLDIERS 

— THE SIMPLON MILAN RESEMBLANCE TO PARIS — THE CA- 
THEDRAL — GUERCINO'S HAGAR MILANESE EXCLUSIVENES5. 

May 1834. 

My fifth journey over the Appenines — dull of course. On 
the second evening we were at Bologna. The long colon- 

Y 



322 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

nades pleased me less than before, with their crowds of 
foreign officers and ill-dressed inhabitants ; and a placard 
for the opera, announcing Malibran's last night, relieved us 
of the prospect of a long evening of weariness. The divine 
music of La Norma, and a crowded and brilliant audience, 
enthusiastic in their applause, seemed to inspire this still 
incomparable creature even beyond her wont. She sang 
with a fulness, an abandonment, a passionate energy and 
sweetness that seemed to come from a soul rapt and pos- 
sessed beyond control with the melody it had undertaken. 
They were never done calling her on the stage after the 
curtain had fallen. After six re-appearances, she came out 
once more to the foot-lights, and murmuring something in- 
audible from lips that showed strong agitation, she pressed 
her hands together, bowed till her long hair, falling over 
her shoulders, nearly touched her feet, and retired in tears. 
She is the siren of Europe for me ! 

I was happy to have no more to do with the Duke ot 
Modena, than to eat a dinner in his capital. We did not 
" forget the picture/' but my inquiries for it were as 
fruitless as before. I wonder whether the author of the 
" Pleasures of Memory" has the pleasure of remembering 
having seen the picture himself. " Tassoni's bucket, which 
is not the true one," is still shown in the Tower, and the 
keeper will kiss the cross upon his fingers, that Samuel 
Rogers has written a false line. 

At Parma we ate parmesan, and saw the Correggio. The 
angel who holds the book up to the infant Saviour ; the 
female laying her cheek to his feet ; the countenance of the 
holy child himself, are creations that seem apart from all 
else in the schools of painting. They are like a group, not 
from life, but from heaven. They are superhuman, and, 
unlike other pictures of beauty, which stir the heart as if 
thev resembled something one had loved or might have 
loved, these mount into the fancy like things transcending 
sympathy, and only within reach of an intellectual and 
elevated wonder. This is the picture that Sir Thomas 
Lawrence returned six times in one day to see. It is the 
only thing I saw to admire in the duchy of Maria Louisa. 
An Austrian regiment marched into the town as we left it, 
and an Italian at the gate told us that the Duchess had 



LOMBARDY. 323, 

disbanded her last troops of the country, and supplied their 
place with these yellow and black Croats and Illyrians. 
Italy is Austria now to the foot of the Appenines — if not 
to the top of Radicofani. 

Lombardy is full of nightingales. They sing by day, 
however, (as not specified in poetry.) They are up quite 
as early as the lark, and the green hedges are alive with 
their gurgling and changeful music till twilight. Nothing 
can exceed the fertility of these endless plains. They are 
four or five hundred miles of uninterrupted garden. The 
same eternal level road ; the same rows of elms and poplars 
on either side ; the same long, slimy canals ; the same 
square, vine-laced, perfectly green pastures and corn-fields; 
the same shaped houses ; the same voiced beggars with the 
same sing-song whine, and the same villanous Austrians 
poring over your passports and asking to be paid for it, 
from the Alps to the Appenines. It is wearisome, spite of 
green leaves and nightiugales. A bare rock or a good 
brigand-looking mountain would so refresh the eye ! 

At Piacenza, one of those admirable German bands was 
playing in the public square, while a small corps of picked 
men were manoeuvred. Even an Italian, 1 should think, 
though he knew and felt it was the music of his oppressors, 
might have been pleased to listen. And pleased they seemed 
to be — for there were hundreds of dark-haired and well- 
made men, with faces and forms for heroes, standing and 
keeping time to the well-played instruments, as peacefully 
as if there were no such thing as liberty, and no meaning 
in the foreign uniforms crowding them from their own 
pavement. And there were the women of Piacenza, nod- 
ding from the balconies to the white moustachios and padded 
coats strutting below, and you would never dream Italy 
thought herself wronged, watching the exchange of courte- 
sies between her dark-eyed daughters and these fair-haired 
coxcombs. 

We crossed the Po, and entered Austria's nominal domi- 
nions. They rummaged our baggage as if they smelt re- 
publicanism somewhere $ and after showing a strong dispo- 
sition to retain a volume of very bad poetry as suspicious, 
and detaining us two long hours, they had the modesty to 
ask to be paid for letting us off lightly. '■ When we declined 

Y 2 



324 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

it, the chef threatened us a precious searching " the next 

time. 39 How willingly I would submit to the annoyance to 

have that next time assured to me! Every step I take 

toward the bounds of Italy pulls so upon my heart ! 
* * * * * * 

As most travellers come into Italy over the Simplon, 
Milan makes generally the first enthusiastic chapter in their 
books. I have reversed the order mvself, and have a better 
right to praise it from comparison. For exterior, there is 
.certainly no city in Italy comparable to it. The streets are 
broad and noble ; the buildings magnificent ; the pavement 
quite the best in Europe ; and the Milanese (all of whom I 
presume I have seen, for it is Sunday, and the streets swarm 
with them) are better dressed, and look "better to do in 
the world " than the Tuscans, who are gayer and more 
Italian, and the Romans, who are graver and vastly hand- 
somer, Milan is quite like Paris. The showy and mirror- 
lined cafes; the elegant shops; the variety of strange 
people and costumes, and a new gallery lately opened in 
imitation of the glass-roofed passages of the French capital^ 
make one almost feel that the next turn will bring him 
upon the Boulevards. 

The famous cathedral, nearly completed by Napoleon, is 
a sort of Aladdin creation, too delicate and beautiful for the 
open air. The filmy traceries of Gothic fretwork ; the 
needle-like minarets; the hundreds of beautiful statues 
with which it is studded ; the intricate, graceful, and be- 
wildering architecture of every window and turret, and 
the frost-like frailness and delicacy of the whole mass,. 
make an effect altogether upon the eye that must stand 
high on the list of new sensations. It is a vast structure 
"withal ; but a middling easterly breeze, one would think, 
in looking at it, would lift it from its base, and bear it over 
the Atlantic like the meshes of a cobweb. Neither interior 
nor exterior impresses you with the feeling of awe common 
to other large churches. The sun struggles through the 
immense windows of painted glass, staining every pillar 
and carved cornice with the richest hues ; and wherever 
the eye wanders, it grows giddy with the wilderness of 
architecture. The people on their knees are like paintings 
in the strong artificial light ; the checkered pavement seems- 



MILAN. 325 

trembling with a quivering radiance ; the altar is far and 
indistinct, and the lamps burning over the tomb of Saint 
Carlo shine out from the centre like gems glistening in the 
midst of some enchanted hall. This reads very like rhapsody, 
hut it is the way the place impressed me. It is like a great 
dream. Its excessive beauty scarce seems constant while 
the eye rests upon it. 

The Brera is a noble palace, occupied by the public 
galleries of statuary and painting. I felt on leaving Florence 
that I could give pictures a very long holiday. To live on. 
them, as one does in Italy, is like dining from morn till 
night. The famous Guercino is at Milan, however, — the 
" Hagar," which Byron talks of so enthusiastically, and I 
once more surrendered myself to a cicerone. The picture 
catches your eye on your first entrance. There is that 
harmony and effect, in the colour that mark a master-piece, 
even in a passing glance. Abraham stands in the centre of 
the group, a fine, prophet-like " green old man," with a 
mild decision in his eye, from which there is evidently no 
appeal. Sarah has turned her back, and you can just read 
in the half-profile glance of her face that there is a little 
pity mingled in her hard-hearted approval of her rival's 
banishment. But Hagar — who can describe the world of 
meaning in her face ? The closed lips have in them a calm 
incredulousness, contradicted with wonderful nature in the 
flushed and troubled forehead, and the eyes red with long 
weeping. The gourd of w T ater is hung over her shoulder, 
her hand is turning her sorrowful boy from the door, and 
she has looked back once more, with a large tear coursing 
down her cheek, to read in the face of her master if she is 
indeed driven forth for ever. It is the instant before pride 
and despair close over her heart. You see in the picture 
that the next moment is the crisis of her life. Her gaze is 
straining upon the old man's lips, and you wait breathlessly 
to see her draw up her bending form, and depart in proud 
sorrow for the wilderness. It is a piece of powerful and 
passionate poetry. It affects you like nothing but a reality. 
The eyes get warm, and the heart beats quick ; and as you 
walk away you feel as if a load of oppressive sympathy was 
lifting from your heart. 

I have seen little else in Milan, except Austrian soldiers, 



326 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

of whom there are fifteen thousand in this single capita! ; 
The government has issued an order to officers not on duty, 
to appear in citizen's dress ; it is supposed to diminish the 
appearance of so much military preparation. 

For the rest, they make a kind of coffee here, by, boiling 
it with cream, which is better than any thing of the kind 
either in Paris or Constantinople ; and the Milanese are, 
for slaves, the most civil people I have seen, after the Flo- 
rentines. There is little English society; I know not why, 
except that the Italians are rich enough to be exclusive, 
and make their houses difficult of access to strangers. 



LETTER VII. 
LOMBARDY— AUSTRIA—THE ALPS. 

A MELANCHOLY PROCESSION LAGO MAGGIORE ISOLA BELLA 

THE STMPLON MEETING A FELLOW-COUNTRYMAN — THE VAL- 
LEY OF THE RHONE. 

May 1854. 

In going out of the gates of Milan, we met a cart full of 
peasants, tied together and guarded by gens-d 'amies — the 
fifth sight of the kind that has crossed us since we passed 
the Austrian border. The poor fellows looked very inno- 
cent and very sorry. The extent of their offences probably 
might be the want of a passport, and a desire to step over 
the limits of his majesty's possessions. A train of beautiful 
horses, led by soldiers along the ramparts, (the property of 
the Austrian officers) were in melancholy contrast to their 
sad faces. 

The clear snowy Alps soon came in sight, and their cold 
beauty refreshed us in the midst of a heat that prostrated 
every nerve in the system. It is only the first of May, and 
they are mowing the grass everywhere on the road, the 
trees are in their fullest leaf, the frogs and nightingales 
singing each other down, and the grasshopper would be a 



ISOLA BELLA. 327 

burden. Toward night we crossed the Sardinian frontier* 
and in an hour were set down at an auberge on the bank of 
Lake Maggiore, in the little town of Arona. The moun- 
tains on the other side of the broad and mirror-like water 
are specked with ruined castles ; here and there a boat is 
leaving its long line of ripples behind in its course ; the 
cattle are loitering home ; the peasants sit on the benches 
before their doors -, and all the lovely circumstances of a 
rural summer's sunset are about us, in one of the very 
loveliest spots in nature. A very old Florence friend is my 
companion, and what with mutual reminiscences of sunny 
Tuscany, and the deepest love in common for the sky over 
our heads, and the green land around us, we are noting 
down u red days" in our calendar of travel. 

We walked from Arona by sunrise, four or five miles 
along the borders, of Lake Maggiore. The kind-hearted 
peasants on the way to the market raised their hats to us in 
passing, and I was happy that the greeting was still " buon 
giorno" Those dark-lined mountains before us were to 
separate me too soon from the mellow accents in which it 
was spoken. As yet, however, it was all Italian — the 
ultra-marine sky, the clear half- purpled hills, the inspiring 
air — we felt in every pulse that it was still Italy. 

We were at Baveno at an early hour, and took a boat 
for Isola Bella. It looks like a gentleman's villa afloat. 
A boy might throw a stone entirely over it in any direction. 
It strikes you like a kind of toy as you look at it from a 
distance, and, getting nearer, the illusion scarcely dissipates 
—for, from the water's edge, the orange-laden terraces are 
piled one above another like a pyramidal fruit-basket ; the 
villa itself peers above like a sugar castle, and it scarce 
seems real enough to land upon. We pulled round to the 
northern side, and disembarked at a broad stone staircase, 
where a cicerone, with a look of suppressed wisdom common 
to his vocation, met us with the offer of his services. 

The entrance-hall was hung with old armour, and a 
magnificent suite of apartments above, opening on all sides 
upon the lake, was lined thickly with pictures — none of 
them remarkable except one or two landscapes by the savage 
Tempesta. Travellers going the other way would probably 
admire the collection more than we. We were glad to be 



328 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

handed over by our pragmatical custode to a pretty conta- 
dina, who announced herself as the gardener's daughter, 
and gave us each a bunch of roses. It was a proper com- 
mencement to an acquaintance upon Isola Bella. She led 
the way to the waters edge, where, in the foundations of 
the palace, a suite of eight or ten spacious rooms is con- 
structed cl la grolle — with a pavement laid of small stones 
of different colours : walls and roof of fantastically set shells 
and pebbles, and statues that seem to have reason in their 
nudity. The only light came in at the long doors opening 
down to the lake ; and the deep leather sofas, and dark 
cool atmosphere, with the light break of the waves outside, 
and the long views away toward Isola Madre, and the far. 
off opposite shore, composed altogether a most seductive 
spot for an indolent humour and a summer's day. I shall 
keep it as a cool recollection till sultry summers trouble me 
no more. 

But the garden was the prettiest place. The lake is lovely 
enough any way ; but to look at it through perspectives of 
orange alleys, and have the blue mountains broken by stray 
branches of tulip-trees, clumps of crimson rhododendron, 
and clusters of citron, yellower than gold — to sit on a gar- 
den-seat in the shade of a thousand roses, with sweet-scented 
shrubs and verbenums, and a mixture of novel and delicious 
perfumes embalming the air about you, and gaze up at 
snowy Alps and sharp precipices, and down upon a broad 
smooth mirror in which the islands lie like clouds, and over 
which the boats are silently creeping with their white sails, 
like birds asleep in the sky — why, (not to disparage nature) 
it seems to my poor judgment, that these artificial appliances 
are an improvement even to Lago Maggiore. 

On one side, without the villa walls, are two or three 
small houses, one of which is occupied as an hotel ; and here, 
if I had a friend with matrimony in his eye, would I strongly 
recommend lodgings for the honeymoon. A prettier cage 
for a pair of billing doves no poet would conceive you. 

We got on to Domo d'Ossola to sleep, saying many an 
oft-said thing about the entrance to the valleys of the Alps. 
They seem common when spoken of these romantic places, 
but they are not the less new in the glow of a first impres- 
sion. 



THE SIMPLON. 82Q 

We were a little in start of the sun this morning, and 
commenced the ascent of the Simplon by a gray summer's 
dawn, before which the last bright star had not yet faded. 
From Dorao d'Ossola we rose directly into the mountains, 
and soon wound into the wildest glens by a road which was 
-flung along precipices and over chasms and water- falls like 
a waving riband. The horses went on at a round trot, and 
so skilfully are the difficulties of the ascent surmounted, 
that we could not believe we had passed the spot that from 
below hung above us so appallingly. The route follows the 
foaming river Vedro, which frets and plunges along at its 
side or beneath its hanging bridges, with the impetuosity of 
a mountain torrent, where the stream is swollen at every 
short distance with pretty waterfalls — messengers from the 
melting snows on the summits. There was one, a water- 
Aide rather than a fall, which I stopped long to admire. It 
came from near the peak of the mountain, leaping at first 
from a green clump of firs, and descending a smooth in- 
clined plane, of perhaps two hundred feet. The effect was 
like drapery of the most delicate lace, dropping into festoons 
from the hand. The slight waves overtook each other and 
mingled and separated, always preserving their elliptical 
and foaming curves, till, in a smooth scoop near the bottom, 
they gathered into a snowy mass, and leaped into the Vedro 
in the shape of a twisted shell. If wishing could have 
witched it into Mr. Cole's sketch-book, he would have a 
new variety of water for his next composition. 

After seven hours' driving, which scarce seemed ascend- 
ing but for the snow and ice and the clear air it brought us 
into, we stopped to breakfast at the village of Simplon, 
" three thousand two hundred and sixteen feet above the 
sea level." Here we first realized that we had left Italy. 
The landlady spoke French, and the postillions German ! 
My sentiment has grown threadbare with travel, but I 
don't mind confessing that the circumstance gave me an 
unpleasant thickness in the throat. I threw open the 
southern window, and looked back toward the marshes of 
Lombardy, and if I did not say the poetical thing, it was 
because 

'* It is the silent grief that cuts the heart-strings." 

In sober sadness, one may well regret any country where 



330 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

Lis life has been filled fuller than elsewhere of sunshine 
and gladness ; and such, by a thousand enchantments, ha» 
Italy been to me. Its climate is life in my nostrils; it* 
hills and valleys are the poetry of such things ; and its 
marbles, pictures, and palaces beset the soul like trje very 
necessities of existence. You can exist elsewhere, but, oh I 
you live in Italy ! 

I was sitting by my English companion on a sledge in 
front of the hotel, enjoying the sunshine, when the Dili- 
gence drove up, and six or eight young men alighted. One 
of them walking up and down the road to get the cramp of 
a confined seat out of his legs, addressed a remark to us in 
English. We had neither of us seen him before, but we 
exclaimed simultaneously, as he turned away, " That's an 
American." " How did you know he was not an English- 
man ? " I asked. " Because," said my friend, " he spoke to 
us without an introduction and without a reason, as English- 
men are not in the habit of doing, and because he ended his 
sentence with ' Sir/ as no Englishman does except he is 
talking to an inferior, or wishes to insult you." " And 
how did you know it?" asked he. " Partly by instinct," I 
answered, " but more because, though a traveller, he wears 
a new hat that cost him ten dollars, and a new cloak that 
cost him fifty : (a peculiarly American extravagance) be- 
cause he made no inclination of his body either in addressing 
or leaving us, though his intention was to be civil ; and 
because he used fine dictionary words to express a common 
idea, which, by the way, too, betrays his southern breeding. 
And, if you want other evidence, he has just asked the 
gentleman near him to ask the conducteur something about 
his breakfast, and an American is the only man in the 
world that ventures to come abroad without at least French 
enough to keep himself from starving." It may appear ill- 
natured to write down such criticisms on one's own country- 
man ; but the national peculiarities by which we are dis«< 
tinguished from foreigners, seemed so well denned in his- 
instance, that I thought it worth mentioning. We found 
afterward that our conjecture was right. His name and 
country were on the brass-plate of his portmanteau in most 
legible letters, and I recognised it directly as the address of 
an amiable and excellent man, of whom I had once or twice 
heard m. Italy, though I had never before happened to meet 



ALPS OF HELVETIA BRIGG. 331 

him. Three of the faults oftenest charged upon our coun- 
trymen, are over-fine clothes, over-fine words, and over-fine 
or over-free manners. 

From Simplon we drove two or three miles between 
heaps of snow, lying in some places from six to ten feet 
deep. Seven hours before, we had ridden through fields of 
grain almost ready for the harvest ! After passing one or 
two galleries built over the road to protect it from the 
avalanches where it ran beneath the loftier precipices, we 
got out of the snow, and saw Brigg, the small town at the 
foot of the Simplon, on the other side, lying almost directly 
beneath us. It looked as if one might toss his cap down 
into its pretty gardens. Yet we were four or five hours- 
in reaching it, by a road that seemed in most parts scarcely 
to descend at all. The views down the valley of the Rhone, 
which opened continually before us, were of exquisite beauty. 
The river itself, which is here near its source, looked like 
a meadow rivulet in its silver windings ; and the gigantic 
Helvetian Alps, which rose in their snow on the other side 
of the valley, were glittering in the slant rays of a declining 
sun, and of a grandeur of size and outline which diminished^ 
even more than distance, the river and the clusters of vil- 
lages at their feet. 



LETTER VIII. 
SWITZERLAND. 



LA VALAIS THE CRETINS AND THE GOITRES A FRENCHMAN'S 

OPINION OF NIAGARA LAKE LEMAN CASTLE OF CHILLON 

ROCKS OF MEILLERIE REPUBLICAN AIR MONT BLANC 

GENEVA. 

MAY 1834. 

We have been two days and a half loitering down through, 
the Swiss canton of La Valais, and admiring every hour the 
magnificence of these snow-capped and green-footed Alps* 
The little chalets seem just lodged by accident on the crags, 



332 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

or struck against slopes so steep, that the mowers of the 
mountain-grass are literally let down by ropes to their dizzy 
occupation. The goats alone seem to have an exemption 
"from all ordinary laws of gravitation, feeding against cliffs 
~which it makes one giddy to look on only ; and the short- 
waisted girls dropping a courtesy and blushing as they pass 
the stranger, emerge from the little mountain-paths, and 
stop by the first spring to put on their shoes and arrange 
.their ribands coquetishly before entering the village. 

The two dreadful curses of these valleys meet one at 
every step — the cretins, or natural fools, of which there is 
at least one in every family ; and the goitre, or swelled 
throat, to which there is hardly an exception among the 
women. It really makes travelling in Switzerland a melan- 
choly business, with all its beauty ; at every turn in the 
road, a gibbering and mowing idiot, and in every group of 
females, a disgusting array of excrescences too common even 
to be concealed. Really, to see girls that else were beauti- 
ful, arrayed in all their holiday finery, but with a defect 
that makes them monsters to the unaccustomed eye — their 
throats swollen to the size of their heads, seems to me one 
of the most curious and pitiable things 1 have met with in 
my wanderings. Many attempts have been made to account 
for the growth of the goitre, but it is yet unexplained. The 
men are not so subject to it as the women, though among 
them, even, it is frightfully common. But how account 
for the continual production by ordinary parents of this 
brute race of cretins? They all look alike — dwarfish, 
large-mouthed, grinning, and of hideous features and ex- 
pression. It is said that the children of strangers, born in 
the valley, are very likely to be idiots, resembling the cretin 
exactly. It seems a supernatural curse upon the land. The 
Valaisians, however, consider it a blessing to have one in 
the family. 

The dress of the women of La Valais is excessively unbe- 
coming, and a pretty face is rare. Their manners are kind 
and polite, and at the little aaberges, where we had stopped 
on the road, there has been a cleanliness and a generosity 
in the supply of the table, which prove virtues among them 
not found in Italy. 

At Turttmann, we made a little excursion into the moun- 



TURTTBTANN LAKE LEMAN. 333 

tains to see a cascade. It falls about a hundred feet, and 
Las just now more water than usual from the melting of 
the snows. It is a pretty fall. A Frenchman writes in 
the book of the hotel, that he has seen Niagara and Tren- 
ton Falls, in America, and that they do not compare with 
the cascade of Turttmann ! 

From Martigny the scenery hegan to grow richer, and, 
after passing the celebrated Fall of Pissevache, (which 
springs from the top of a high Alp almost into the road, 
and is really a splendid cascade ) we approached Lake 
Leman in a gorgeous sunset. We rose a slight hill, and 
over the broad sheet of water on the opposite shore, reflected 
with all its towers in a mirror of gold, lay the castle of 
Chillon. A bold green mountain rose steeply behind ; the 
sparkling village of Vevey lay further down on the water's- 
edge ; and away • toward the sinking sun, stretched the 
long chain of the Jura, tinted with all the hues of a dolphin. 
Never was such a lake of beauty — or it never sat so point- 
edly for its picture. Mountains and water, chateaux and 
shallops, vineyards and verdure, could do no more. We 
left the carriage and walked three or four miles along the 
southern bank under the " Rocks of Meillerie," and the 
spirit of St. Preux's Julie, if she haunt the scene where she 
caught her death, of a sunset in May, is the most enviable 
of ghosts. I do not wonder at the prating in albums of 
Lake Leman. For me, it is (after Val d'Arno from Fiesole) 
the ne plus ultra of a scenery in Paradise. 

We are stopping for the night at St. Gingoulf, on a swel- 
ling bank of the lake, and we have been lying under the 
trees in front of the hotel till the last perceptible tint is- 
gone from the sky over Jura. Two pedestrian gentlemen,, 
with knapsacks and dogs, have just arrived; and a whole 
family of French people, including parrots and monkeys,, 
came in before us, and are deafening the house with their 
chattering. A cup of coffee, and then good night ! 

My companion, who has travelled all over Europe on 
foot, confirms my opinion that there is no drive on the 
Continent equal to the forty miles between the rocks of 
Meillerie and Geneva, on the southern bank of the Leman. 
The Lake is not often much broader than the Hudson : the 
shores are the noble mountains sung so gloriously by Childe 



334 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAIT. 

Harold : Vevey, Lausanne, Copet, and a string of smaller 
villages, all famous in poetry and story, fringe the opposite 
water's edge with cottages and villages, while you wind for 
ever along a green lane following the bend of the shore, 
the road as level as your hall pavement, and green hills 
massed up with trees and verdure, overshadowing you con- 
tinually. The world has a great many sweet spots in it, 
and I have found many a one which would make fitting 
scenery for the brightest act of life's changeful drama — but 
here is one, where it seems to me as difficult not to feel 
genial and kindly, as for Taglioni to keep from floating 
away like a smoke-curl when she is dancing in La Baya- 
dere. 

We passed a bridge and drew in a long breath to try the 
•difference in the air — we were in the republic of Geneva. 
It smelt very much as it did in the dominions of his majesty 
of Sardinia— sweet-briar, hawthorn, violets and all. I used 
to think when I first came from America, that the flowers 
(republicans by nature as well as birds) were less fragrant 
under a monarchy. 

Mont Blanc loomed up very white in the south -, but, 
like other distinguished persons of whom we form an 
opinion from the descriptions of poets, the " monarch of 
mountains" did not seem to me so very superior to his 
fellows. After a look or two at him as we approached 
Geneva, I ceased straining my head out of the cabriolet, 
and devoted my eyes to things more within the scale of my 
affections — the scores of lovely villas sprinkling the hills 
and valleys by which we approached the city. Sweet — 
sweet places they are, to be sure ! And then, the month 
is May, and the straw r bonneted and white- aproned girl, — 
ladies and peasants alike, — were all out at their porches 
and balconies ; lover-like couples were sauntering down 
the park-lanes 5 one servant passed us with a tri-cornered 
blue billet-doux between his thumb and finger; the nightin- 
gales were singing their very hearts away to the new-blown 
roses, and a sense of summer and seventeen, days of sun- 
shine and sonnet-making, came over me irresistibly. I should 
like to see June out in Geneva. 

The little steamer that makes the tour of Lake Leman 
began to " fizz" by sunrise directly under the windows of 



A PARTING SCENE. 335 

-our hotel. We were soon on the pier, where our entrance 
into the hoat was obstructed by a cluster of weeping girls, 
embracing and parting very unwillingly with a young lady 
of some eighteen years, who was lovely enough to have 
been wept for by as many grown-up gentlemen. Her own 
tears were under better government, though her sealed lips 
showed that she dared not trust herself with her voice. 
After another and another lingering kiss, the boatman ex- 
pressed some impatience, and she tore herself from their 
arms and stepped into the waiting bateau. We were soon 
alongside the steamer, and sooner under weigh, and then, 
having given one wave of her handkerchief to the pretty 
and sad group on the shore, our fair fellow-passenger gave 
way to her feelings, and, sinking upon a seat burst into a 
passionate flood of tears. There was no obtruding on such 
sorrow, and the next hour or two were employed by my 
imagination in filling up the little drama of which we had 
.seen but the touching conclusion. 

I was pleased to find the boat (a new one) called the 
" Winkelreid," in compliment to the vessel which makes 
the same voyage in Cooper's " Headsman of Berne " The 
day altogether had begun like a chapter in romance — 

" Lake Leman woo'd us with its crystal face,'* 

but there was the filmiest conceivable veil of mist over its 
unruffled mirror, and the green uplands that rose from its 
edge had a softness like dream-land upon their verdure. 
] know not whether the tearful girl whose head was droop- 
ing over the railing felt the sympathy, but I could not help 
thanking nature for her in my heart, the whole scene was 
so of the complexion of her own feelings. I could have 
" thrown my ring into the sea/' like Policrates Samius, 
€t to have cause for sadness too. 

The " Winkelreid" has (for a republican steamer) rather 
the aristocratical arrangement of making those who walk 
aft the funnel pay twice as much as those who choose to 
-promenB.^e forward — for no earthly reason that I can divine, 
other than that those who pay dearest have the full benefit 
of the oily gases from the machinery, while the humbler 
passenger breaths the air of heaven before it has passed 
through that improving medium. Our youthful Niobe, 



336 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

two French ladies not particularly pretty, an Englishman 
with a fishing-rod and gun, and a coxcomb of a Swiss artist 
to whom I had taken a special aversion at Rome (from a 
criticism I overheard upon my favourite picture in the 
Colonna), my friend and myself, were the exclusive inhalers 
of the oleaginous atmosphere of the stern. A crowd of the 
ark's own miscellaneousness thronged the forecastle — and so 
you have the programme of a day on Lake Leman. 



LETTER IX. 
SWITZERLAND. 

XAKE LEMAN AMERICAN APPEARANCE OF THE GENEVESE 

STEAMBOAT ON THE RHONE GIBBON AND ROUSSEAU AD- 
VENTURE OF THE LILIES GENEVESE JEWELLERS RESIDENCE 

OF VOLTAIRE- — BYRON'S NIGHTCAP— VOLTAIRE^ WALKING- 
STICK AND STOCKINGS. 

MAY 1833. 

The water of Lake Leman looks very like other water, 
though Byron and Shelley were nearly drowned in 
it : and Copet, a little village on the Helvetian side, where 
we left three women and took up one man, (the village 
ought to be very much obliged to us) is no Paradise, 
though Madame de Stael made it her residence. There 
are Paradises, however, with very short distances between, 
all the way down the northern shore, and angels in them — » 
if women are angels — a specimen or two of the sex being 
visible with the aid of the spy-glass, in nearly every balcony 
and belvidere, looking upon the water. The taste in 
country-houses seems to be here very much the same as in 
New England, and quite unlike the half-palace, half-castle 
style common in Italy and France. Indeed the dress, 
physiognomy, and manners of old Geneva might make an 
American Genevese fancy himself at home on the Leman. 
There is that subdued decency ; that grave respectability ; 
that black-coated, straight-haired, saint-like kind of look,. 



THE GENEVESE. 337 

which is universal in the small towns of our country, and 
which is as unlike France and Italy, as a playhouse is unlike 
a methodist chapel. You would know the people of Geneva 
were Calvinists, whisking through the town merely in a 
Diligence. 

I lost sight of the town of Morges, eating a tete-a-tete 
"breakfast with my friend in the cabin. Switzerland is the 
only place out of America where one gets cream for his 
coffee. I cry Morges mercy on that plea. 

We were at Lausanne at eleven, having steamed forty- 
five miles in five hours. This is not quite up to the thirty- 
milers on the Hudson, of which I see accounts in the 
papers, but we had the advantage of not being blown up 
either going or corning, and of looking for a continuous 
minute on a given spot in the scenery. Then we had an 
iron railing between us and that portion of the passengers 
who prefer garlic to lavender-water, and we achieved our 
breakfast without losing our tempers or complexions in a 
scramble. The question of superiority between Swiss and 
American steamers, therefore, depends very much on the 
value you set on life, temper, and time. For me, as my 
time is not measured in ei diamond sparks/' and as my life 
and temper are the only gifts w T ith w T hich fortune has 
blessed me, I prefer the Swiss. 

Gibbon lived at Lausanne, and wrote here the last 
chapter of his History of Rome — a circumstance which he 
records with an affection. It is a spot of no ordinary 
beauty, and the public promenade, where we sat and looked 
over to Vevy and Chillon, and the Rocks of Meillerie, and 
talked of Rousseau, and agreed that it was a scene "faite 
pour une Julie pour une Claire ei pour un Saint Preux," is 
one of the places where, if I were to " play statue/' I 
should like to grow to my seat, and compromise merely for 
eyesight. We have one thing against Lausanne, however 
— it is up hill and a mile from the water ; and if Gibbon 
walked often from Ouchet at noon, and " larded the lean 
earth " as freely as we, I make myself certain he was not 
the fat man his biographers have drawn him. 

There were some other circumstances at Lausanne which 
interested us — but which criticism has decided cannot be 
obtruded upon the public. We looked about for " Julie " 



338 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

and " Claire," spite of Rousseau's " ne les y cherchez pas," 
and gave a blind beggar a sous (all he asked) for a handful 
of lilies-of-the-valley, pitying him ten times more than if he 
had lost his eyes out of Switzerland. To be blind on Lake 
Leman ! blind within sight of Mont Blanc ! We turned 
back to drop another sous into his hat, as we reflected 
upon it. 

The return steamer from Vevey (I was sorry not to go 
to Vevey, for Rousseau's sake, and as much for Cooper's) 
took us up on its way to Geneva, and we had the advantage 
of seeing the same scenery in a different light. Trees, 
houses, and mountains, are so much finer seen against the 
sun, with the deep shadows toward you ! 

Sitting by the stern was a fat and fair French-woman, 
who, like me, had bought lilies, and about as many. With 
a very natural facility of dramatic position, I imagined it 
had established a kind of sympathy between us, and pro- 
posed to myself, somewhere in the four hours, to make it 
serve as an introduction. She went into the cabin after a 
while, to lunch on cutlets and beer, and returned to the 
deck without her lilies. Mine lay beside me, within reach 
of her four fingers ; and as I was making up my mind to 
offer to replace her loss, she coolly took them up, and, 
without even a French monosyllable, commenced throwing 
them overboard, stem by stem. It was very clear she had 
mistaken them for her own. As the last one flew over the 
tafferel, the gentleman who paid for la bierre et les cotelettes, 
husband or lover, came up with a smile and a flourish, and 
reminded her that she had left her bouquet between the 
mustard and the beer-bottle. Sequitur — a scene. The 
lady apologized, and I disclaimed ; and the more I insisted 
on the delight she had given me by throwing my pretty 
lilies into Lake Leman, the more she made herself unhappy, 
and insisted on my being inconsolable. One should come 
abroad to know how much may be said upon throwing 
overboard a bunch of lilies. 

The clouds gathered, and we had some hopes of a storm, 
but the " darkened Jura " was merely dim, and the " live 
thunder " waited for another Childe Harold. We were at 
Geneva at seven, and had the whole population to witness 
our debarkation. The pier where we landed, and the new 






JEWELLERS OF GENEVA. 33$ 

bridge across the outlet of the Rhone, are the evening 
promenade. 

The far-famed jewellers of Geneva are rather an aristo- 
cratic class of merchants. They are to be sought in 
chambers, and their treasures are produced box by box, 
from locked drawers, and bought, if at all, without the 
pleasure of "beating down/' They are, withal, a gentle- 
manlike class of men ; and, of the principal one, as many 
stories are told as of Beau Brummel. He has made a 
fortune by his shop, and has the manners of a man who 
can afford to buy the jewels out of the king's crown. 

We were sitting at the table d'hote, with about forty 
people, on the first day of our arrival, when the servant 
brought us each a gilt-edged note, sealed with an elegant 
device — invitations we presumed, to a ball, at least. Mr. 
So-and-so (I forget -the name) begged pardon for the liberty 
he had taken, and requested us to call at his shop in the 
Rue de Rhone, and look at his varied assortment of bi- 
jouterie. A card was enclosed, and the letter in courtly 
English. We went, of course; as who would not? The 
cost to him was a sheet of paper, and the trouble of sending 
to the hotel for a list of the new arrivals. I recommend 
the system to all callow Yankees commencing a " pushing 
business." 

Geneva is full of foreigners in the summer, and it has 
quite the complexion of an agreeable place. The environs 
are, of course, unequalled, and the town itself is a stirring 
and gay oapital, full of brilliant shops, handsome streets 
and promenades, where every thing is to be met but pretty 
women. Female beauty would come to a good market any 
where in Switzerland, We have seen but one pretty girl 
(our Niobe of the steamer) since we lost sight of Lombardy. 
They dress well here and seem modest, and have withal an 
air of style j but of some five hundred ladies, whom I may* 
have seen in the valley of the Rhone, and about this neigh- 
bourhood, it would puzzle a modern Apelles to compose 
an endurable Venus. I understand a fair countrywoman of 
ours is about taking up her residence in Geneva ; and if 
Lake Leman does not " woo her," and the "live thunder * 
leap down from Jura, the jewellers, at least, will crown her 
queen of the Canton, and give her the tiara at cost. 

z 2 



340 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

I hope " Maria Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs " will forgive 
me for having gone to Ferney in an omnibus ! Voltaire 
lived just under the Jura, on a hill side, overlooking 
Geneva and the lake, with a landscape before him in the 
foreground that a painter could not improve, and Mont 
Blanc and its neighbour mountains the breaks to his 
horizon. 

At six miles off, Geneva looks very beautifully, astride the 
exit of the Rhone from the lake ; and the lake itself loots 
more like a broad river, with its edges of verdure and its 
outer-frame of mountains. We walked up an avenue to a 
large old villa, embosomed in trees, where an old gardener 
appeared, to show us the grounds. We said the proper 
thing under the tree planted by the philosopher ; fell in 
love with the view from twenty points ; met an English 
lady in one of the arbours, the wife of a French nobleman 
to whom the house belongs, and were bowed into the hall 
by the old man, and handed over to his daughter to be 
shown the curiosities of the interior. There were Voltaire's 
rooms, just as he left them. The ridiculous picture of his 
own apotheosis, painted under his own direction, and repre- 
senting him offering his Henriade to Apollo with all the 
authors of his time dying of envy at his feet, occupies the 
most conspicuous place over his chamber door. Within was 
his bed — the curtains nibbled quite bare by relic-gathering 
travellers; a portrait of the Empress Catherine, embroidered 
hy her own hand, and presented to Voltaire ; his own 
portrait and Frederick the Great's, and many of the 
philosophers, including Franklin. A little monument 
stands opposite the fire-place, with the inscription " Mon 
esprit est partout, et mon cceitr est ici." It is a snug little 
dormitory, opening with one window to the west ; and, to 
those who admire the character of the once illustrious oc- 
cupant, a place for very tangible musing. They showed us 
afterward his walking-stick, a pair of silk stockings he had 
half- worn, and a night cap. The last article is getting 
quite fashionable as a relic of genius. They show Byron's 
at Venice. 






PRACTICAL BATHOS. 34t 

LETTER X. 
FRANCE. 



PRACTICAL BATHOS OF CELEBRATED PLACES TRAVELLING COM- 
PANIONS AT THE SIMPLON — CUSTOM-HOUSE COMFORTS TRIALS 

OF TEMPER DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF FRANCE, ITALY, AND 

SWITZERLAND — FORCE OF POLITENESS. 

May 1854. 

Whether it was that I had offended the genius of the 
spot by coming in an omnibus, or from a desire I never can 
resist in such places — to travesty and ridicule the mock so- 
lemnity with which they are exhibited, certain it is, that I 
left Ferney without having encountered, even in the shape 
of a more serious thought, the spirit of Voltaire. One 
reads the third canto of Childe Harold in his library, and 
feels as if iC Lausanne and Ferney " should be interesting 
places to the traveller ; and yet when he is shown Gibbon's 
bower by a fellow scratching his head and hitching up his 
trowsers the while, and the night-cap that enclosed the 
busy brain from which sprang the fifty brilliant tomes on 
his shelves, by a country-girl, who hurries through her 
drilled description, with her eye on the silver douceur in 
his ringers he is very likely to rub his hand over his eyes, 
and disclaim, quite honestly, all pretensions to enthu- 
siasm. And yet, I dare say, I shall have a great deal 
of pleasure in remembering that I have been at Ferney. 
As an English traveller would say, " I have done 
Voltaire !" 

Quite of the opinion that it was not doing justice to 
Geneva to have made but a three days' stay in it — regretting 
not having seen Sismondi, Simond, and a whole coterie of 
scholars and authors, whose home it is, and with a mind 
quite made up to return to Switzerland, when my beaux 
jours of love, money, and leisure shall have arrived, I 
crossed the Rhone at sunrise, and turned my face toward 
Paris. 

The Simplon is much safer travelling than the pass of 



342 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

the Jura. We were all day getting up the mountains by 
roads that would make me anxious if there were a neck in 
the carriage I would rather should not be broken. My 
company, fortunately, consisted of three Scotch spinsters 
who would try any precipice of the Jura, I think, if there 
were a lover at the bottom. If the horses had backed in 
the wrong place, it would have been to all three, I am 
sure, a deliverance from a world in whose volume of 
•happiness 

" their leaf 
By some o'er-hasty angel was misplaced." 

As to my own neck and my friend's, there is a special 
providence for bachelors, even if they were of importance 
enough to merit a care. Spinsters and bachelors, we all 
arrived safely at Rousses, the entrance to France ; and here, 
if I were to write before repeating the alphabet, you would 
see what a pen could do in a passion. 

The carriage was stopped by three custom-house officers, 
and taken under a shed, where the doors were closed behind 
it. We were then required to dismount and give our 
honours that we had nothing new in the way of clothes; 
" no jewellery ; no unused manufactures of wool, thread, 
or lace ; no silks or floss silk ; no polished metals, plated or 
varnished; no toys, (except a heart each) nor leather, 
glass, or crystal manufactures." So far, I kept my 
temper. 

Our trunks, carpet-bags, hat-boxes, dressing-cases, and 
jjorlfeuilles, were then dismounted and critically examined 
— every dress and article unfolded ; shirts, cravats, un- 
mentionables and all, and searched thoroughly by two- 
ruffians, whose fingers were no improvement upon the 
labours of the washerwoman. In an hour's time or so we 
•were allowed to commence re-packing. Still, I kept my 
temper! 

We were then requested to walk into a private room, 
while the ladies, for the same purpose, were taken, by a 
woman, into another. Here we were requested to unbutton 
our coats, and, begging pardon for the liberty, these 
courteous gentlemen thrust their hands into our pockets, 



TRIALS OF TEMPER. 34<3 

felt in our bosoms, pantaloons, and shoes, examined our 
hats, and even eyed our " pet curls " very earnestly, in the 
expectation of finding us crammed with Geneva jewellery. 
Still I kept my temper ! 

Our trunks were then put upon the carriage and a sealed 
string put upon them, which we were not to cut till we 
arrived in Paris. (Nine days !) They then demanded to 
be paid for the sealing, and the fellows who had unladen 
the carriage were to be paid for their labour. This done, 
we were permitted to drive on. Still, I kept my temper ! 

We arrived, in the evening, at Morez, in a heavy rain. 
We were sitting around a comfortable fire, and the soup 
and fish were just brought upon the table. A soldier 
entered and requested us to walk to the police office. " But 
it rains hard, and our dinner is just ready." The man in 
the moustache was inexorable. The commissary closed his 
office at eight, and we must go instantly to certify to our 
passports, and get new ones for the interior. Cloaks and 
umbrellas were brought, and bon gre, mat gre, we walked 
half a mile in the mud and rain to a dirty commissary, who 
kept us waiting in the dark fifteen minutes, and then, 
making out a description of the person of each, demanded 
half a dollar for the new passport, and permitted us to 
wade back to our dinner. This had occupied an hour, and 
no improvement to soup or fish. Still, I kept my temper 
— rather. 

The next morning, while we were forgetting the annoy- 
ances of the previous night, and admiring the new-pranked 
livery of May by a glorious sunshine, a civil arretez-vous 
brought up the carriage to the door of another custom-house I 
The order was to dismount, and down came once more, car- 
pet bags, hat-boxes, and dressing-cases, and a couple of hours 
were lost again in a fruitless search for contraband articles. 
When it was all through, and the officers and men paid as 
before, we were permitted to proceed with the gracious 
assurance that we should not be troubled again till we got 
to Paris! I bade the commissary good morning — felicitated 
him on the liberal institutions of his country and his zeal 
in the exercise of his own agreeable vocation, and — I am 
free to confess — lost my temper ! — -Job and Xantippe's 
husband ! could I help it I 



S44< PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

I confess I expected better things of France. In Italy, 
where you come to a new dukedom every half day, you do 
not much mind opening your trunks, for they are petty 
princes and need the pitiful revenue of contraband articles 
and the officer's fee. Yet even they leave the person of 
the traveller sacred ; and where in the world, except in 
France, is a party travelling evidently for pleasure subjected 
twice at the same border to the degrading indignity of a 
search ? Ye " hunters of Kentucky " — thank heaven that 
you can go into Tennessee without having your "plunder " 
overhauled and your pockets searched by successive parties 
of scoundrels, whom you are to pay, u by order of govern- 
ment," for their trouble !" 

****** 

The Simplon, which you pass in a day, divides two 
nations, each other's physical and moral antipodes. The 
handsome, picturesque, lazy unprincipled Italian is left in 
the morning in his own dirty and exorbitant inn j and on 
the evening of the same day, having crossed but a chain of 
mountains, you find yourself in a clean auberge $ nestled 
in the bosom of a Swiss valley; another language spoken 
around you, and in the midst of a people who seem to 
require the virtues they possess to compensate them for 
more than their share of uncomeliness. You travel a day 
or two down the valley of the Rhone, and when you are 
"become reconciled to cretins and goitres, and ill- dressed and 
worse-formed men and women, you pass in another single 
day the chain of the Jura, and find yourself in France — a 
country as different from both Switzerland and Italy as 
they are from each other. How is it that these diminutive 
cantons preserve so completely their nationality ? It seems 
a problem to the traveller who passes one from the other 
without leaving his carriage. 

One is compelled to like France in spite of himself. You 
are no sooner over the Jura than you are enslaved, past all 
possible ill-humour, by the universal politeness. You stop 
for the night at a place, which, as my friend remarked, 
resembles an inn only in its z/i-attention, and after a bad 
supper, worse beds, and every kind of annoyance, down 
comes my lady-hostess in the morning to receive her coin ; 
and if you can fly into a passion with such a cap, and suck 



FRANCE. 8&5 

a smile, and such a " bon Jour," you are of less penetrable 
stuff than man is commonly made of. 

" Politeness is among the virtues/' says the philosopher. 
Rather, it takes the place of them all. What can you 
believe ill of a people whose slightest look towards you is 
made up of grace and kindness ? 

We are dawdling along thirty miles a day through Bur- 
gundy, sick to death of the bare vine-stakes, and longing to 
see a festooned vineyard of Lombardy. France is such an 
ugly country ! The diligences lumber by, noisy and ludic- 
rous; the cow- tenders wear cocked-hats; the beggars are 
in the true French extreme, theatrical in all their misery ; 
the climate is rainy and cold, and as unlike that of Italy, as 
if a thousand leagues separated them ; and the roads are 
long, straight, dirty, and uneven. There is neither pleasure 
nor comfort, neither scenery nor antiquities, nor accommo- 
dations for the weary — nothing but politeness. And it is 
odd how it reconciles vou to it all. 



LETTER XL 
PARIS AND LONDON. 

PARIS AND THE PARISIANS LAFAYETTE'S FUNERAL ROYAL RE- 
SPECT AND GRATITUDE ENGLAND DOVER ENGLISH NEAT- 
NESS AND COMFORT — SPECIMEN OF ENGLISH RESERVE THE, 

GENTLEMAN DRIVER OF FASHION — A CASE FOR MRS. TROLLOPE. 

May 1834. 

It is pleasant to get oack to Paris. One meets every body 
there one ever saw : and operas and coffee ; Taglioni and 
Leontine Fay 5 the belles and the Boulevards -, the shops, 
spectacles, life, lions, and lures to every species of pleasure, 
rather give you the impression that, outside the barriers of 
Paris, time is wasted on travel. 

What pleasant idlers they look ! The very shop-keepers 
<seem standing behind their counters for amusement. The 
soubrette who sells you a cigar, or ties a crape on your arm, 



346 PENCILLNGS BY THE WAY. 

(it was for poor old Lafayette ) is coiffed as for a ball ; the 
frotteur who takes the dust from your boots, sings his love-- 
song as he brushes away ; the old man has his bouquet in 
his bosom, and the beggar looks up at the new statue of 
Napoleon in the Place Vendome — every body has some 
touch of fancy, some trace of a heart on the look-out, at 
least, for pleasure. 

I was at Lafayette's funeral. They buried the old patriot 
like a criminal. Fixed bayonets before and behind his 
.hearse — his own National Guard disarmed, and troops 
enough to beleaguer a city, were the honours paid by the 
u citizen king " to the man who had made him ! The in- 
dignation, the scorn, the bitterness expressed on every side 
among the people, and the ill-smothered cries of disgust as 
the two empty royal carriages went by, in the funeral train, 
seemed to me strong enough to indicate a settled and 
universal hostility to the government. 

I met Dr. Bo wring on the Boulevard after the funeral 

was over. I had not seen him for two years, but he could 

talk of nothing but the great event of the day. 

* * * • * ' * 

May 23, 1834. 

After three delightful days in Paris, we took the northern 
Diligence ; and, on the second evening, having passed 
hastily through Montreuil, Abbeville, Boulogne, and voted 
the road the dullest couple of hundred miles we had seen 
In our travels, we were set down in Calais. A stroll 
through some very indifferent streets ; a farewell visit to 
the last French cafe we were likely to see for a long time, 
and some unsatisfactory inquiries about Beau Brummel, 
who is said to live here still, filled up till bed-time our last 
day on the Continent. 

The celebrated Countess of J was on board the 

steamer, and some forty or fifty plebeian stomachs shared 
with her fashionable ladyship and ourselves the horrors of 
a passage across the Channel. It is rather the most dis- 
agreeable sea I ever traversed, though I have seen '* the 

Euxine," " the roughest sea the traveller e'er s in," 

&c. according to Don Juan. 

I was lying on my back in my berth when the steamer 
reached her moorings at Dover, and had neither eyes nor 



AN ENGLISH HOTEL. 34! 

disposition to indulge in the proper sentiment on approach- 
ing the " white cliffs" of ray father-land. I crawled on deck, 
and was met by a wind as cold as December, and a crowd 
of rosy English faces on the pier, wrapped in cloaks and 
shawls, and indulging curiosity evidently at the expense of 
a shiver. It was the first of June ! 

My companion led the way to an hotel, and we were 
introduced by English waiters (I had not seen such a thing 
in three years, and it was quite like being waited on by 
gentlemen) to two blazing coal fires in the coffee room of 
the Ship. Oh what a comfortable place it appeared ! A 
rich Turkey carpet snugly fitted ; nicely-rubbed mahogany 
tables ; the morning papers from London ; bell-ropes that 
would ring the bell; doors that would shut; a landlady 
that spoke English, and w T as kind and civil ; and, though 
there were eight or .ten people in the room, no noise above 
the rustle of a newspaper, and positively rich red damask 
curtains, neither second-hand nor shabby, to the windows t 
A greater contrast than this to the things that answer to 
them on the Continent could scarcely be imagined. 

Malgre all my observations on the English, whom I have 
found everywhere the most open-hearted and social people 
in the world, they are said by themselves and others to be 
just the contrary ; and, presuming they were different in 
England, I had made up my mind to seal my lips in all 
public places, and be conscious of nobody's existence but 
my own. There were several elderly persons dining at the 
different tables, and one party, of a father and son, waited 
on by their own servants. Candles were brought in ; the 
different cloths were removed, and, as my companion had 
gone to bed, I took up a newspaper to keep me company 
over my wine. In the course of an hour, some remark had 
been addressed to me, provocative of conversation, by almost 
every individual in the room ! The subjects of discussion 
soon became general, and I have seldom passed a more 
social and agreeable evening. And so much for the first 
specimen of English reserve ! 

The fires were burning brilliantly, and the coffee-room 
was in the nicest order when we descended to our break- 
fast at six the next morning. The tea-kettle sung on the 
hearth, the toast was hot, and done to a turn, and the 



348 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

waiter was neither sleepy nor uncivil— all, again, very 
unlike a morning at an hotel in la belle France. 

The coach rattled up to the door punctually at the hour ; 
and, while they were putting on my way-worn baggage, I 
stood looking in admiration at the carriage and horses. 
They were four beautiful bays, in small, neat harness of 
glazed leather, brass mounted ; their coats shining like a 
racer's ; their small blood-looking heads curbed up to stand 
exactly together, and their hoofs blacked and brushed with 
.the polish of a gentleman's boots. The coach was gaudily 
painted, the only thing out of taste about it; but it was 
admirably built — the wheel-horses were quite under the 
coachman's box, and the whole affair, though it would carry 
twelve or fourteen people, covered less ground than a 
French one-horse cabriolet. It was altogether quite a 
study. 

We mounted to the top of the coach ; i€ all right," said 
the ostler, and away shot the four fine creatures, turning 
their small ears, and stepping together with the ease of a 
cat, at ten miles in the hour. The driver was dressed like a 
Broadway idler, and sat in his place, and held his "ribands" 
and his tandem-whip with a confident air of superiority, as 
if he were quite convinced that he and his team were be- 
yond criticism — and so they were. I could not but smile 
at contrasting his silence and the speed and ease with which 
we went along, with the clumsy, cumbrous Diligence or 
vetturino, and the crying, whipping, cursing, and ill-ap- 
pointed postillions of France and Italy. It seems odd, in a 
two-hours' passage, to pass over such strong lines of national 
difference — so near, and not even a shading of one into the 
other 

England is described always very justly, and always in 
the same words — ei it is all one garden." There is scarce a 
cottage between Dover and London, (seventy miles) where 
a poet might not be happy to live. I saw a hundred little 
spots I coveted with quite a heart-ache. There was no 
poverty on the road. Everybody seemed employed, and 
everybody well-made and healthy. The relief from the 
deformity and disease of the way- side beggars cf the Con- 
tinent was very striking. 

We were at Canterbury before I had time to get actus- 






AN ENGLISH COACHMAN. 34$^ 

tomed to my seat. The horses had been changed twice — 
the coach, it seemed to me, hardly stopping while it was 
done ; way-passengers were taken up and put down, with 
their baggage, without a word, and in half a minute ; 
money was tossed to the keeper of the turnpike- gate as we 
dashed through; the wheels went over the smooth road 
without noise, and with scarce a sense of motion — it was* 
the perfection of travel. 

The new driver from Canterbury rather astonished me. 
He drove into London every day, and was more of a 
"swell." He owned the first teem himself, four blood 
horses of great beauty, and it was a sight to see him drive 
them. His language was free from all slang ; very gentle- 
manlike and well-chosen, and he discussed everything. He 
found out that I was an American, and said we did not 
think enough of the memory of Washington. Leaving his 
bones in the miserable brick tomb, of which he had read 
descriptions, was not, in his opinion, worthy of a country 
like mine. He went on to criticise Giulia Grisi, (the new 
singer just then setting London on fire) hummed airs from 
u II Pirata," to show her manner; sang an English song 
like Braham ; gave a decayed count, who sat on the box, 
some very sensible advice about the management of a wild 
son; drew a comparison between French and Italian women; 
(he had travelled) told us who the old count was in very 
tolerable French, and preferred Edmund Kean and Fanny 
Kemble to all actors in the world. His taste and his phi- 
losophy, like his driving, were quite unexceptionable. He 
was, withal, very handsome, and had the easy and respect- 
ful manners of a well-bred person. It seemed very odd to 
give him a shilling at the end of the journey. 

At Chatham we took up a very elegantly dressed young 
man, who had come down on a fishing excursion. He was 
in the army, and an Irishman. We had not been half an 
hour on the seat together, before he had discovered, by so 
many plain questions, that I was an American, a stranger 
in England, and an acquaintance of a whole regiment of 
his friends in Malta and Corfu. If this had been a Yankee, 
thought I, what a chapter it would have made for Basil 
Hall or Madame Trollope ! With all his inquisitiveness I 
liked my companion, and half accepted his offer to drive me 



350 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

down to Epsom the next day to the races. I know no 
American who would have beaten that on a stage-coacb 
.acquaintance. 



LETTER XII. 



LONDON. 

FIRST VIEW OF LONDON — THE KING'S BIRTH-DAY — PROCESSION 
OF MAIL-COACHES REGENT-STREET LADY B , &C. 

MAY 1854. 

1?rom the top of Shooter's Hill we got our first view of 
^London — an indistinct, architectural mass, extending all 
round to the horizon, and half enveloped in a dim and 
lurid smoke. ie That is St. Paul's ! — there is Westminster 
Abbey! — there is the Tower!" What directions were 
i;hese to follow for the first time with the eye ! 

From Blackheath, (seven or eight miles from the centre 
of London) the beautiful hedges disappeared, and it was 
one continued mass of buildings. The houses were amazingly 
small, a kind of thing that would do for an object in an 
Imitation perspective park ; but the soul of neatness per- 
vaded them. Trellises were nailed between the little win- 
dows, roses quite overshadowed the low doors, a painted 
5ence enclosed the hand's-breadth of grass-plot, and very, 
oh, very sweet faces bent over lapfuls of work beneath the 
snowy and looped-up curtains. It was all home-like and 
-amiable. There was an affectionateness in the mere out- 
side of every one of them. 

After crossing Waterloo Bridge, it was busy work for the 
-eyes. The brilliant shops, the dense crowds of people, the 
^absorbed air of every passenger, the lovely women, the cries, 
the flying vehicles of every description, passing with the 
anost dangerous speed — accustomed as I am to large cities.. 
It quite made me giddy. We got into a u jarvey " at the 
coach-office, and in half an hour I was in comfortable 






LONDON — -AN ACQUAINTANCE. 351 

quarters, with windows looking down St. James's- street, 
and the most interesting leaf of my life to turn over. 
" Great emotions interfere little with the mechanical opera- 
tions of life," however, and I dressed and dined, though it 
was my first hour in London. 

I was sitting in the little parlour alone over a fried sole 
and a mutton cutlet, when the waiter came in, and, plead- 
ing the crowded state of the hotel, asked my permission to 
spread the other side of the table for a clergyman. I have 
a kindly preference for the cloth, and made not the slightest 
objection. Enter a fat man, with top-boots and a hunting- 
whip, rosy as Bacchus, and excessively out of breath with 
mounting one flight of stairs. Beefsteak and potatoes, a 
pot of porter and a bottle of sherry followed close on his 
heels. With a single apology for the intrusion, the reve- 
rend gentleman fell to, and we ate and drank for a while 
in true English silence. 

" From Oxford, sir, I presume ? " he said at last, pushing 
back his plate, with an air of satisfaction. 

" No, I had never the pleasure of seeing Oxford." 

" R — e — ally ! may I take a glass of wine with you, 
sir ? " 

We got on swimmingly. He would not believe I had 
never been in England till the day before, but his cor- 
diality was no colder for that. We exchanged Port and 
Sherry, and a most amicable understanding found its way 
down with the wine. Our table was near the window, 
and a great crowd began to collect at the corner of St. 
James's-street. It was the king's birth -day, and the people 
were thronging to see the carriages come in state from the 
royal levee. The show was less splendid than the same 
thing in Rome and Vienna, but it excited far more of my 
admiration. Gaudiness and tinsel were exchanged for plain 
richness and perfect fitness in the carriages and harness, 
while the horses were incomparably finer. My friend 
pointed out to me the different liveries as they turned 
the corner into Piccadilly — the Duke of Wellington's 
among others. I looked hard to see his Grace; but the 
two pale and beautiful faces on the back-seat carried 
nothing like the military nose on the handles ot the 
umbrellas. 



352 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

The annual procession of mail-coaches followed, and it 
was hardly less brilliant. The drivers and guards in theit 
bright red and gold uniforms ; the admirable horses driven 
so beautifully ; the neat harness ; the exactness with which 
the room of each horse was calculated, and the small space 
in which he worked, and the compactness and contrivance 
of the coaches, formed altogether one of the most interest- 
ing spectacles I had ever seen. My friend, the clergyman, 
with whom I had walked out to see them pass, criticised 
the different teams con arnore, but in language which I did 
not always understand. I asked him once for an explana- 
tion ; but he looked rather grave, and said something about 
" gammon/' evidently quite sure that my ignorance of Lon- 
don was a mere quiz. 

We walked down Piccadilly, and turned into, beyond all 
comparison, the handsomest street I ever saw. The Toledo 
of Naples ; the Corso of Rome, the Kohl-Market of Vienna; 
the Rue de la Paix and Boulevards of Paris, have each im- 
pressed me strongly with their magnificence, but they are 
really nothing to Regent Street. I had merely time to get 
a glance at it before dark ; but for breadth and convenience, 
for the elegance and variety of the buildings — though all of 
the same scale and material — and for the brilliancy and ex- 
pensiveness of the shops, it seemed to me quite absurd to 
compare it with any thing between New York and Con- 
stantinople — Broadway and the Hippodrome included. 

It is the custom for the king's tradesmen to illuminate 
their shops on his Majesty's birth-night, and the principal 
streets on our return were in a blaze of light. The crowd 
was immense. None but the lower order seemed abroad ; 
and I cannot describe to you the effect on my feelings on 
hearing my own language spoken by every man, woman, 
and child, about me. It seemed a completely foreign coun- 
try in every other respect — different from what I had 
imagined ; different from my own and all that I had seen ; 
and coming to it last, it seemed to me the farthest off and 
strangest country of all ; and yet the little sweep, who 
went laughing through the crowd, spoke a language that I 
had heard attempted in vain by thousands of educated 
people, and that 1 had grown to consider next to unattain- 
able by others, and almost useless to myself. Still, it did 



LADY B . 353 

not make me feel at home. Every thing else about me was 
too new. It was like some mysterious change in my own 
ears — a sudden power of comprehension, such as a man 
might feel who was cured suddenly of deafness. You can 
scarcely enter into my feelings till you have had the changes 
of French, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, Illyrian, and 
the mixtures and dialects of each, rung upon your hearing 
almost exclusively, as I have for years. I wandered about 
as if I were exercising some supernatural faculty in a dream. 

A friend in Italy had kindly given me a letter to Lady 
B ; and with a strong curiosity to see this cele- 
brated authoress, I called on the second day after my arrival 
in London. It was "deep i* the afternoon " but I had not 
yet learned the full meaning of town hours. " Her Lady- 
ship had not come down to breakfast." I gave the letter 
and my address to the powdered footman, and had scarce 
reached home when a note arrived inviting me to call the 
same evening at ten. 

In a long library lined alternately with splendidly-bound 
books and mirrors, and with a deep window of the breadth 
of the room, opening upon Hyde Park, I found Lady 

B alone. The picture to my eye as the door opened 

was a very lovely one : — a woman of remarkable beauty half 
buried in afauteuilof yellow satin, reading by a magnificent 
lamp suspended from the centre of the arched ceiling ; sofas, 
couches, ottomans, and busts arranged in rather a crowded 
sumptuousness through the room ; enamel tables, covered 
with expensive and elegant trifles in every corner ; and a 
delicate white hand relieved on the back of a book, to which 
the eye was attracted by the blaze of its diamond rings. As 
the servant mentioned my name, she rose and gave me her 
hand very cordially ; and a gentleman entering immediately 

after, she presented me to Count D'O , the well-known 

Pelham of London, and certainly the most splendid speci- 
men of a man and a well-dressed one that I had ever seen. 
Tea was brought in immediately, and conversation went 
swimmingly on. 

Her Ladyship's inquiries were principally about America, 
of which, from long absence, I knew very little. She was 
extremely curious to know the degrees of reputation the 
present popular authors of England enjoy among us, parti- 

2 A 



854 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

cularly B , and DT , (the author of * Vivian 

Grey/) " If you will come to-morrow night/' she said, 
" you will see B . I am delighted that he is popu- 
lar in America. He is envied and abused — for nothing, I 
believe, except for the superiority of his genius/ and the 
brilliant literary success it commands; and knowing this, 
he chooses to assume a pride which is only the armour of 
a sensitive mind afraid of a wound. He is to his friends 
the most frank and noble creature in the world, and open 
to boyishness with those whom he thinks understand and 
value him. He has a brother, Henry, who is alsp very 
clever in a different vein, and is just now publishing a book 
on the present state of France. 

" Do they like the D'l in America?" 

I assured her Ladyship that the ' Curiosities of Litera- 
ture/ by the father, and ' Vivian Grey ' and c Contarini 
Fleming/ by the son, were universally known. 

" I am pleased at that, for I like them both. D'l 

the elder came here with his son the other night. It would 
have delighted you to see the old man's pride in him, and 

the son's respect and affection for his father. D'l 

the elder lives in the country, about twenty miles from 
Town ; seldom comes up to London, and leads a life of 
learned leisure, each day hoarding up and dispensing forth 
treasures of literature. He is eourtly, yet urbane, and im- 
presses one at once with confidence in his goodness. In 
his manners, D'l the younger is quite his own cha- 
racter of Vivian Grey ; full of genius and eloquence, with 
extreme good nature and a perfect frankness of character." 

I asked if the account I had seen in some American paper 
of a literary celebration at Canandaigua, and the engraving 
of her Ladyship's name with some others upon a rock, was 
not a quiz. 

" Oh, by no means. I was much amused by the whole 
affair. I have a great idea of taking a trip to America to 
see it. Then the letter, commencing ' Most charming 
Countess — for charming you must be since you have written 
the Conversations of Lord Byron ' — oh, it was quite de- 
lightful. I have shown it to everybody. By the way, I 
receive a great many letters from America, from people I 
never heard of, written in the most extraordinary style of 



THE d'i 35 5 

compliment, apparently in perfectly good faith. I hardly 
know what to make of them." 

I accounted for it by the perfect seclusion in which great 
numbers of cultivated people live in our country, who, 
having neither intrigue, nor fashion, nor twenty other 
things to occupy their minds as in England, depend entirely 
upon books, and consider an author who has given them 
pleasure as a friend. ie America/' I said, " has probably 
more literary enthusiasts than any country in the world ; 
and there are thousands of romantic minds in the interior 
of New England, who know perfectly every writer on this 
side the water, and hold them all in affectionate veneration, 
scarcely conceivable by a sophisticated European. If it 
were not for such readers, literature would be the most 
thankless of vocations 5 I, for one, would never write 
another line." 

u And do you think these are the people who write to 
me ? If I could think so, I should be exceedingly happy. 
A great proportion of the people in England are refined 
down to such heartlessness ; criticism, private and public, is 
so much influenced by politics; that it is really delightful 
to know there is a more generous tribunal. Indeed I think 
many of our authors now are beginning to write for Ame- 
rica. We think already a great deal of your praise or cen- 



sure." 



I asked if her Ladyship had known many Americans ? 

ei Not in London, but a great many abroad. I was with 

Lord B in his yacht at Naples when the American 

fleet was lying there, ten or eleven years ago, and we were 
constantly on board your ships. I knew Commodore Creigh- 
ton and Captain Deacon extremely well, and liked them 
particularly. They were with us frequently of an evening 
on board the yacht or the frigate, and I remember very well 
the bands playing always ' God save the King ' as we went 

up the side. Count D'O here, who spoke very little 

English at that time, had a great passion for ' Yankee 
Doodle,' and it was always played at his request." 

The Count, who still speaks the language with a very 
slight accent, but with a choice of words that shows him 
to be a man of uncommon tact and elegance of mind, in- 
quired after several of the officers, whom I have not the 

2 A 2 



356 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 






pleasure of knowing. He seemed to remember his visits to 
the frigate with great pleasure. The conversation, after 
running upon a variety of topics, turned very naturally 

upon Byron. I had frequently seen the Countess G 

°n the Continent, and I asked Ladv B » if she 

;new her. 

" Yes, very well. We were at Genoa when they were 
living there, but we never saw her. It was at Rome in 
the year 1828 that I first knew her, having formed her ac- 
quaintance at Count Funchal's, the Portuguese Ambas- 
sador's." 

It would be impossible, of course, to make a full and fair 
record of a conversation of some hours. I have only noted 
one or two topics which I thought most likely to interest 
an American reader. During all this long visit, however, 
my eyes were very busy in finishing for memory a portrait 
of the celebrated and beautiful woman before me. 

The portrait of Lady B in the ' Book of Beauty ' 

is not unlike her, but it is still an unfavourable likeness. 
A picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence hung opposite me 
taken, perhaps, at the age of eighteen, which is more like 
her, and as captivating a representation of a just matured 
woman, full of loveliness and love, the kind of creature 
with whose divine sweetness the gazer's heart aches, as 
ever was drawn in the painter's most inspired hour. The 
original is no longer dans sa premiere jeunesse. Still she 
looks something on the sunny side of thirty. Her person 
is full, but preserves all the fineness of an admirable shape ; 
her foot is not pressed in a satin slipper, for which a Cin- 
derella might long be looked for in vain ; and her com- 
plexion (an unusually fair skin, with very dark hair and 
eyebrows,) is of even a girlish delicacy and freshness. Her 
dress of blue satin (if I am describing her like a milliner, it 
is because I have here and there a reader in my eye who 
will be amused by it) was cut low and folded across her 
bosom, in a way to show to advantage the round and sculp- 
ture-! ike curve and whiteness of a pair of exquisite sh ul- 
ders, while her hair, dressed close to her head, and parted 
simply on her forehead with a rich feronier of turquoise, 
enveloped in clear outline, a head with which it would be 
difficult to find a fault Her features are regular, and her 



PORTRAIT OF LADY B . 357 

mouth, the most expressive of them, has a ripe fulness and 
freedom of play, peculiar to the Irish physiognomy, and ex- 
pressive of the most unsuspicious good-humour. Add to 
all this a voice merry and sad by turns, but always musical, 
and manners of the most unpretending elegance, yet even 
more remarkable for their winning kindness, and you have 
the prominent traits of one of the most lovely and fas- 
cinating women I have ever seen. Remembering her 
talents and her rank, and the unenvying admiration she 
receives from the world of fashion and genius, it would 
be difficult to reconcile her lot to the " doctrine of com- 
pensation." 

There is one remark I may as well make here, with 
regard to the personal descriptions and anecdotes with which 
my letters from England will of course be filled. It is quite 
a different thing from publishing such letters in London. 
America is much farther off from England than England 
from America. You in New York read the periodicals of 
this country, and know every thing that is done or written 
here, as if you lived within the sound of Bow-bell. The 
English, however, just know of our existence ; and if they 
get a general idea twice a year of our progress in politics, 
they are comparatively well informed. Our periodical lite- 
rature is never even heard of. Of course, there can be no 
offence to the individuals themselves in any thing which a 
visitor could write, calculated to convey an idea of the 
person or manners of distinguished people to the American 
public. I mention it, lest, at first thought, I might seem 
to have abused the hospitality or frankness of those on 
whom letters of introduction have given me claims for 
civilitv. 



858 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY, 

LETTER XIII. 
THE LITERATI OF LONDON. 

LADY B —THE AUTHOR OF ' REJECTED 

HENRY B COUNT d'o THE AUTHOR OF * PEL- 
HAM.* 

Spent my first day in London in wandering about the 
finest part of the West End. I am not easily tired in a 
city ; but I walked till I could scarce lift my feet from the 
ground, and still the parks and noble streets extended before 
and around me as far as the eye could reach ; and, strange 
as they were in reality, the names were as familiar to me 
as if my childhood had been passed amongst them. H Bond 
Street ;" " Grosvenor Square;" " Hyde Park;" look new 
to my eye, but they sound very familiar to my ear. 

The equipages of London are much talked of, but they 
exceed even description. Nothing could be more perfect, 
or apparently more simple, than the gentleman's carriage 
that passes you in the street. Of a modest colour, but the 
finest material, the crest just visible on the panels; the 
balance of the body upon its springs true and easy ; the 
hammer- cloth and liveries of the neatest and most har- 
monious colours ; the harness slight and elegant, and the 
horses " the only splendid thing" in the establishment— is 
a description that answers for the most of them. Perhaps 
the most perfect thing in the world, however, is a St. 
James' Street stanhope or cabriolet, with its dandy owner 
on the swhip-seat, and the " tiger" beside him. The atti- 
tudes of both the gentleman and the "gentleman's gentle- 
man " are studied to a point, but nothing could be more 
knowing or exquisite than either. The whole affair, from 
the angle of the bell-crowned hat, (the prevailing fashion 
on the steps of Crockford's at present) to the blood legs of 
the thorough-bred creature in harness, is absolutely fault- 
less. I have seen many subjects for study in my first day's 
stroll, but I leave the men and women and some other less 
important features of London for maturer observation. 






THE LITERATI OF LONDON. 359 

In the evening I kept my appointment with Lady 

B . She had deserted her exquisite library for the 

drawing-room, and sat, in fuller dress, with six or seven 
gentlemen about her. I was presented immediately to all 
and when the conversation was resumed, I took the oppor 
tunity to remark the distinguished coterie with which she 
was surrounded. 

Nearest me sat S , the author of ( Rejected Addresses' 

— a hale, handsome man, apparently fifty, with white hair, 
and a very nobly-formed head and physiognomy. His eye 
alone — small and with lids contracted into an habitual look 
of drollery, betrayed the bent of his genius. He held a 
cripple's crutch in his hand, and, though otherwise rather 
particularly well-dressed, wore a pair of large India-rubber 
shoes — the penalty he was paying doubtless for the many 
good dinners he had eaten. He played rather an aside in 
the conversation, whipping in with a quiz or a witticism 
whenever he could get an opportunity, but more a listener 
than a talker. 

On the opposite side of Lady B stood Henry 

B , the brother of the novelist, very earnestly en- 
gaged in a discussion of some speech of O'Connell's. He 
is said by many to be as talented as his brother, and has 
lately published a book on the present state of France. He 
is a small man ; very slight and gentleman-like ; a little 
pitted with the small-pox, and of very winning and per- 
suasive manners. I liked him at the first glance. 

A German prince, with a star on his breast, trying with 
all his might — but, from his embarrassed look, quite unsuc- 
cessfully — to comprehend the drift of the argument, the 
Duke de Richelieu ; a famous traveller just returned from 
Constantinople, and the splendid person of Count D'O — — 
in a careless attitude upon the Ottoman, completed the 
cordon. 

I fell into conversation after a while with S who, 

supposing I might not have heard the names of the others, 
in the hurry of an introduction, kindly took the trouble to 
play the dictionary, and added a graphic character of each 
as he named him. Among other things he talked a great 
deal of America and asked me if I knew our distinguished 
countryman, Washington Irving;. I had never been so for- 



360 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

tunate as to meet him. "You have lost a great deal," he 
said, li for never was so delightful a fellow. I was once 
taken down with him into the country by a merchant to 
dinner. Our friend stopped his carriage at the gate of his 
park, and asked us if we would walk through his grounds 
to the house. Irving refused, and held me down 'by the 
coat, so that we drove on to the house together, leaving our 
host to follow on foot. ' I make it a principle/ said Irving, 
4 never to walk with a man through his own grounds. I 
have no idea of praising a thing whether 1 like it or not. 
You and I will do them to-morrow morning by ourselves/" 
The rest of the company had turned their attention to 

S as he began his story, and there was an universal 

inquiry after Mr. Irving. Indeed the first question on the 
lips of every one to whom I am introduced as an Ame- 
ircan is of . him and Cooper. The latter seems to me to be 
admired as much here as abroad, in spite of a common im- 
pression that he dislikes the nation. No man's works could 
have higher praise in the general conversation that fol- 
lowed, though several instances were mentioned of his hav- 
ing shown an unconquerable aversion to the English when 

in England. Lady B ■ — mentioned Mr. Bryant, and I 

was pleased at the immediate tribute paid to his delightful 
poetry by the talented circle around her. 

Toward twelve o'clock, " Mr. L B " was an- 
nounced, and enter the author of ' Pelham.' I had made 
up my mind how he should look, and between prints and 
descriptions thought I could scarcely be mistaken in my 
idea of his person. No two things could be more unlike, 

however, than the ideal Mr. B in my mind, and the 

real Mr. who followed the announcement. I liked his 

manners extremely. He ran up to Lady B with the 

joyous heartiness of a boy let out of school j and the " how 

d'ye, B ?" went round, as he shook hands with every 

body, in the style of welcome usually given to " the best 
fellow in the world." As I had brought a letter of intro- 
duction to him from a friend in Italy, Lady B intro- 
duced me particularly, and we had a long conversation 
about Naples and its pleasant society. 

B 's head is phrenologically a fine one. His forehead 

retreats very much, but is very broad and well masked, and 



THE LITERATI OF LONDON. 36l 

the whole air is that of decided mental superiority. His 
nose is aquiline. His complexion is fair, his hair profuse, 
curly, and of a light auburn. A more good-natured, habitu- 
ally-smiling expression could hardly be imagined. Perhaps 
my impression is an imperfect one, as he was in the highest 
spirits, and was not serious the whole evening for a minute 
— but it is strictly and faithfully my impression. 

I can imagine no style of conversation calculated to be 
more agreeable than B 's. Gay, quick, various, half- 
satirical, and always fresh and different from every body 
else, he seemed to talk because he could not help it, and 
infected every body with his spirits. I cannot give even 
the substance of it in a letter, for it was in a great measure 
local or personal. 

B 's voice, like his brother's, is exceedingly lover-like 

and sweet. His playful tones are quite delicious, and his 
clear laugh is the soul of sincere and careless merriment. 

It is quite impossible to convey, in a letter scrawled 
literally between the end of a late visit and a tempting 
pillow, the evanescent and pure spirit of a conversation of 
wits. I must confine myself, of course, in such sketches, to 
the mere sentiment of things that concern general literature 
and ourselves. 

e The Rejected Addresses ' got upon his crutches about 
three o'clock in the morning, and I made my exit with the 
rest, thanking Heaven, that, though in a strange country, 
my mother-tongue was the language of its men of genius. 



LETTER XIV. 
LONDON. 

M A DINNER AT LADY B 's. 

June 1834. 

I called on M with a letter of introduction, and met 

him at the door of his lodgings. I knew him instantly 
from the pictures I had seen of him, but was surprised at 



362 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

the diminutiveness of his person. He is much below the 
middle size, and with his white hat and long chocolate 
frock-coat, was far from prepossessing in his appearance. 
With this material disadvantage, however, his address is 
gentlemanlike to a very marked degree, and I should think 

no one could see M without conceiving a strong liking 

for him. As I was to meet him at dinner, I did not detain 
him. In the moment's conversation that passed, he inquired 
very particularly after Washington Irving, expressing for 
'him the warmest friendship, and asked what Cooper was 
doing. 

I was at Lady B \s at eight. M had not arrived, 

but the other persons of the party — a Russian count, who 
spoke all the languages of Europe as well as his own ; a 
Roman banker, whose dynasty is more powerful than the 
pope's ; a clever English nobleman, and the '* observed of 

all observers," Count D'O , stood in the window upon 

the park, killing, as they might, the melancholy twilight 
half-hour preceding dinner, 

" Mr. M r cried the footman at the bottom of the 

staircase. " Mr. M !" cried the footman at the top ; 

and with his glass at his eye, stumbling over an ottoman 
between his near-sightedness and the darkness of the room, 
enter the poet. Half a glance tells you that he is at home 

on a carpet. Sliding his little feet up to Lady B , he 

made his compliments with a gaiety and an ease combined 
with a kind of worshipping deference that was worthy of a 
prime-minister at the court of love. With the gentlemen, 
all of whom he knew, he had the frank, merry manner of a 
confident favourite, and he was greeted like one. He went 
from one to the other, straining back his head to look up at 
them, (for, singularly enough, every gentleman in the room 
was six feet high and upward) and to every one he said 
something which, from any one else, would have seemed 
peculiarly felicitous, but which fell from his lips as if his 
breath was not more spontaneous. 

Dinner was announced, the Russian handed down " mi- 

ladi," and I found myself seated opposite M , with a 

blaze of light on his Bacchus head, and the mirrors with 
which the superb octagonal room is panelled reflecting every 
motion. To see him only at table, you would not think 



SIR WALTER SCOTT IN ITALY. 303 

him a small man. His principal length is in his body, and 
his head and shoulders are those of a much larger person. 
Consequently he sits tall, and with the peculiar erectness of 
head and neck, his diminutiveness disappears. 

The soup vanished in the busy silence that beseems it ; 

and as the courses commenced their procession, Lady B 

led the conversation with the brilliancy and ease for which 
she is remarkable over all the women of her time. She had 

received from Sir William G , at Naples, the manuscript 

of a volume upon the last days of Sir Walter Scott. It was 
a melancholy chronicle of weakened intellect and ruined 
health, and the book was suppressed, but there were two or 
three circumstances narrated in its pages which were inter- 
esting. Soon after his arrival at Naples, Sir Walter went 
with his physician and one or two friends to the great 
museum. It happened that on the same day a large col- 
lection of students and Italian literati were assembled, in 
one of the rooms, to discuss some newly-discovered manu- 
scripts. It was soon known that the li Wizard of the 
North " was there, and a deputation was sent immediately 
to request him to honour them by presiding at their session. 
At this time Scott was a wreck, with a memory that re- 
tained nothing for a moment, and limbs almost as helpless 
as an infant's. He was dragging about among the relics of 
Pompeii, taking no interest in any thing he saw, when their 
request was made known to him through his physician. 
" No, no," said he, " I know nothing of their lingo. Tell 
them 1 am not well enough to come." He loitered on, and 
in about half an hour after, he turned to Dr. H. and said, 
" Who was that you said wanted to see me V The Doctor 
explained. " I '11 go," said he ; they shall see me if they 
wish it $" and against the advice of his friends, who feared 
it would be too much for his strength, he mounted the 
staircase, and made his appearance at the door. A burst of 
enthusiastic cheers welcomed him on the threshold, and 
forming in two lines, many of them on their knees, they 
seized his hands as he passed ; kissed them, thanked him in 
their passionate language for the delight with which he had 
filled the world, and placed him in the chair with the most 
fervent expressions of gratitude for his condescension. The 
discussion went on ; but not understanding a syllable of the 



S64t PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY 

language, Scott was soon wearied, and his friends, observ- 
ing it, pleaded the state of his health as an apology, and he 
rose to take his leave. These enthusiastic children of the 
south crowded once more around him, and, with exclama- 
tions of affection and even tears, kissed his hands once more, 
assisted his tottering steps, and sent after him a confused 
murmur of blessings as the door closed on his retiring form. 
It is described by the writer as the most affecting scene he 
had ever witnessed. 

Some other remarks were made upon Scott, but the 

parole was soon yielded to M , who gave us an account 

of a visit he made to Abbotsford when its illustrious ow r ner 
was in his pride and prime. " Scott," he said, " was the 
most manly and natural character in the world. You felt 
when with him, that he was the soul of truth and hearti- 
ness. His hospitality was as simple and open as the day, 
and he lived freely himself, and expected his guests to do 
so. I remember his giving us whiskey at dinner, and Lady 
Scott met my look of surprise with the assurance that Sir 
Walter seldom dined without it. He never ate or drank to 
excess, but he had no system : his constitution was Hercu- 
lean, and he denied himself nothing. I went once from 
a dinner-party with Sir Thomas Lawrence to meet Scott at 
another place. We had hardly entered the room when we 
were set down to a hot supper of roast chickens, salmon, 
punch, &c, and Sir Walter ate immensely of every thing. 
What a contrast between this and the last time I saw him 
in London ! He had come down to embark for Italy — 

broken quite down in mind and body. He gave Mrs. M 

a book, and I asked him if he would make it more valuable 
by writing in it. He thought I meant that he should write 
some verses, and said, c Oh, I never write poetry now.' I 
asked him to write only his own name and hers, and he 
attempted it, but it was quite illegible. 

Some one remarked that Scott's i Life of Napoleon ' was 
a failure. 

" I think little of it," said M ; " but, after all it 

was an embarrassing task, and Scott did what a wise man 
would do — made as much of his subject as was politic and 
necessary, and no more.'* 

u It will not live," said some one else; €i as much be« 



OX —DUELLING. 365 

cause it is a bad book, as because it is the life of an in- 
dividual." 

" But what an individual ! " M replied, <e Voltaire's 

Life of Charles the Twelfth was the life of an individual, 
yet that will live and be read as long as there is a book in 
the world ; and what was he to Napoleon ? " 

O'C was mentioned. 

"He is a powerful creature/' said M ; "but his 

eloquence has done great harm both to England and Ire- 
land. There is nothing so powerful as oratory. The faculty 
of ' thinking on his legs,' is a tremendous engine in the 
hands of any man. There is an undue admiration for this 
faculty, and a sway permitted to it, which was always 
more dangerous to a country than any thing else. Lord 

A is a wonderful instance of what a man may do without 

talking. There is a' general confidence in him — a universal 

belief in his honesty, which serves him instead. P is a 

fine speaker, but, admirable as he had been as an Opposi- 
tionist, he failed when he came to lead the House. O'C 

would be irresistible, were it not for the two blots on his 
character — the contributions in Ireland for his support, and 
his refusal to give satisfaction to the man he is still willing 
to attack. They may say what they will of duelling : it is 
the great preserver of the decencies of society. The old 
school, which made a man responsible for his words, was 

the better. I must confess I think so. Then, in O'C 's 

case, he had not made his vow against duelling when P 

challenged him. He accepted the challenge, and P 

went to Dover on his way to France, where they were to 

meet ; and O'C pleaded his wife's illness, and delayed 

till the law interfered Some other Irish patriot, about the 
same time, refused a challenge on account of the illness of 
his daughter, and one of the Dublin wits made a good 
-pigram on the two : 

' Some men, with a horror of slaughter, 

Improve on the Scripture command, 
And * honour their ' — wife and their daughter— 

• That their days may be long in the land.' 

The great period of Ireland's glory," continued Moore, 
" was between '82 and '98, and it was a time when a man 



3(?fi PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

aln est lived with a pistol in his hand. Grattan's dying 
advice to his son was, ' Be always ready with the pistol ! * 
He himself never hesitated a moment. At one time, there 
was a kind of conspiracy to fight him out of the world. On 
some famous question, Corrie was employed purpdsely to 
bully him, and made a personal attack of the grossest viru- 
lence. Grattan was so ill, at the time, as to be supported 
into the House between two friends. He rose to reply ; 
•and first, without alluding to Corrie at all, clearly and 
entirely overturned every argument he had advanced that 
bore upon the question. He then paused a moment, and 
stretching out his arm, as if he would reach across the 
House, said, ' for the assertions the gentleman has been 
pleased to make with regard to myself, my answer here is, 
they are false ! elsewhere it would be — a blow !' They 
met, and Grattan shot him through the arm. Corrie 
proposed another shot, but Grattan said, ' No ! let the 
curs fight it out !' and they were friends ever after. I like 
the old story of the Irishman who was challenged by some 
desperate blackguard. ' Fight him! 9 said he, 'I would 
sooner go to my grave without a fight !* Talking of Grat- 
tan, is it not wonderful that, with all the agitation in Ire- 
land, we have had no such men since his time ? Look at 
the Irish newspapers. The whole country in convulsion — 
people's lives, fortunes, and religion at stake, and not a gleam 
of talent from one year's end to the other. It is natural 
for sparks to be struck out in a time of violence like this — 
but Ireland, for all that is worth living for, is dead / You 

can scarcely reckon S of the calibre of her spirits of 

old, and O'C , with all his faults, stands ' alone in his 

glory. 

The conversation I have thus run together is a mere 
skeleton, of course. Nothing but a short hand report could 

retain the delicacy and elegance of M 's language, and 

memory itself cannot embody again the kind of frost-work 
of imagery which was formed and melted on his lips. His 
voice is soft or firm as the subject requires, but perhaps the 
word gentlemanly describes it better than any other. It is 
upon a .natural key, but, if I may so phrase it, it is fused 
with a high-bred affectation, expressing deference and cour- 
tesy, at the same time that its pauses are constructed pecu- 



m . 367 

liarly to catch the ear. It would be difficult not to attend 
to him while he is talking, though the subject were but the 
shape of a wine-glass. 

M 's head is distinctly before me while I write, but 

I shall find it difficult to describe. His hair, which curled 
once all over it in long tendrils, unlike anybody else's in 
the world, and which probably suggested his soubriquet of 
" Bacchus/' is diminished now to a few curls sprinkled 
with grey, and scattered in a single ring above his ears. 
His forehead is wrinkled, with the exception of a most promi- 
nent developement of the organ of gaiety, which, singularly 
enough, shines with the lustre and smooth polish of a pearl, 
and is surrounded by a semicircle of lines drawn close about 
it, like intrenchments against Time. His eyes still sparkle 
like a champagne bubble, though the invader has drawn his 
pencillings about the corners; and there is a kind of wintry 
red, of the tinge of an October leaf, that seems enamelled 
on his cheek, the eloquent record of the claret his wit has 
brightened. His mouth is the most characteristic feature 
of all. The lips are delicately cut, slight and changeable 
as an aspen ; but there is a set-up look about the lower lip 
— a determination of the muscle to a particular expression, 
and you fancy that you can almost see wit astride upon it. 
It is written legibly with the imprint of habitual success. 
It is arch, confident, and half-diffident, as if he were dis- 
guising his pleasure at applause, while another bright gleam 
of fancy was breaking on him. The slightly-tossed nose 
confirms the fun of the expression, and altogether it is a 
face that sparkles, beams, radiates. 

This discussion may be supposed to have occupied the 

hour after Lady B retired from the table ; for, with 

her, vanished M 's excitement, and everybody else 

seemed to feel that light had gone out of the room. Her 
excessive beauty is less an inspiration than the wondrous 
talent with which she draws, from every person around her, 
bis peculiar excellence. Talking better than any body else, 
and narrating, particularly, with a graphic power that I 
never saw excelled, this distinguished woman seems striving 
'>nly to make others unfold themselves ; and never had 
a.wlidence a more apprehensive and encouraging listener. 
But this is a subject with which I should never be done. 



368 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

We went up to coffee, and M brightened again over 

his chasse-cafe, and went glittering on with criticisms on 
Grisij the delicious songstress now ravishing the world, 
whom he placed above all but Pasta ; and whom he thought, 
with the exception that her legs were too short, an incom- 
parable creature. This introduced music very naturally, 
and with a great deal of difficulty he was taken to the 
piano. My letter is getting long, and I have no time to 
.describe his singing. It is well known, however, that its 
effect is only equalled by the beauty of his own words; and, 
for one, I could have taken him into my heart with my 
delight. He makes no attempt at music. It is a kind of 
•admirable recitative, in which every shade of thought is 
syllabled and dwelt upon, and. the sentiment of the song 
goes through your blood, warming you to the very eyelids, 
and starting your tears, if you have a soul or sense in you. 

I have heard of women's fainting at a song of M *s ; 

and if the burden of it answered by chance to a secret in 
the bosom of the listener, I should think, from its com- 
parative effect upon so old a stager as myself, that the heart 
would break with it. 

We all sat around the piano, and after two or three 

songs of Lady B -'s choice, he rambled over the keys 

awhile and sang " When first I met thee," with a pathos 
that beggars description. When the last word had faltered 

out, he rose and took Lady B 's hand, said good-night, 

and was gone before a word was uttered. For a full minute 
after he had closed the door, no one spoke. I could have 
wished, for myself, to drop silently asleep where I sat, with 
the tears in my eyes, and the softness upon my heart— 

" Here's a health to thee, Tom M !" 



ASCOT-HEATH. 36*9 

LETTER XV. 

LONDON. 

VISIT TO A RACE-COURSE — GIPSIES THE PRINCESS VICTORIA — 

SPLENDID APPEARANCE OF THE ENGLISH NOBILITY — A BREAK- 
FAST WITH ELIA AND BRIDGET ELIA MYSTIFICATION CHARLES 

LAMB'S OPINION OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 

June 1854. 

I have just returned from Ascot races. Ascot Heath, on 
which the course is laid out, is a high platform of land, 
beautifully situated on a hill above Windsor Castle, about 
twenty-five miles from London. I went down with a 
party of gentlemen in the morning and returned at evening, 
doing the distance with relays of horses in something less 
than three hours. This, one would think, is very fair 
speed, but we were passed continually by the " bloods " of 
the road, in comparison with whom we seemed getting on 
rather at a snail's pace. 

The scenery on the way was truly English- one series 
of finished landscapes, of every variety of combination. 
Lawns, fancy-cottages, manor-houses, groves, roses, and 
flower-gardens, make up England. It surfeits the eye at 
last. You could not drop a poet out of the clouds upon 
any part of it I have seen, where, within five minutes' walk, 
he would not find himself a Paradise. 

We flew past Virginia Water, and through the sun- 
flecked shades of Windsor Park, with the speed of the wind. 
On reaching the Heath, we dashed out of the road, and 
cutting through fern and briar, our experienced whip put 
his wheels on the rim of the course, as near the stands as 
some thousands of carriages arrived before us would permit, 
and then, cautioning us to take the bearings of our position, 
lest we should lose him after the race, he took off his horses, 
and left us to choose our own places. 

A thousand red and yellow flags were flying from as 
many snowy tents in the midst of the green heath ; ballad- 
singers and bands of music were amusing their little audi- 

2 B 



370 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY 

cnces in every direction ; splendid marquees, covering 
gaming-tables, surrounded the winning-post ; groups of 
country people were busy in every bush, eating and sing- 
ing ; and the great stands were piled with row upon row 
of human heads waiting anxiously for the exhilarating 
contest. 

Soon after we arrived, the king and royal family drove 
up the course with twenty carriages, and scores of postillions 
and outriders in red and gold, flying over the turf as ma- 
jesty flies in no other country; and, immediately after, the 
bell rang to clear the course for the race. Such horses ! 
The earth seemed to fling them off as they touched it. 
The lean jockeys, in their parti-coloured caps and jackets, 
rode the fine-limbed, slender creatures up and down to- 
gether, and then, returning to the starting-post, off they 
shot like so many arrows from the bow. 

Whiz ! you could tell neither colour nor shape as they 
passed across the eye. Their swiftness was incredible. A 

horse of Lord C 's was rather the favourite; and, 

for the sake of his great-grandfather, I had backed him with 
my small wager. " Glaucus is losing/' said some one on 
the top of a carriage above me, but round they swept again, 
and I could just see that one glorious creature was doubling 
the leaps of every other horse, and in a moment Glaucus 
and Lord C had won. 

The course between the races is a promenade of some 
thousands of the best dressed people in England. I thought 
I had never seen so many handsome men and women, but 
particularly men. The nobility of this country, unlike 
every other, is by far the manliest and finest-looking class 
of its population. The contadini of Rome, the lazzaroni of 
Naples, the pay sans of France, are incomparably hand- 
somer than their superiors in rank, but it is strikingly dif- 
ferent here. A more elegant and well-proportioned set of 
men than those pointed out to me by my friends as the 
noblemen on the course, I never saw, except only in Greece. 
The Albanians are seraphs to look at. % 

Excitement is hungry, and after the first race our party 
produced their baskets and bottles, and spreading out the 
cold pie and champagne upon the grass, between the wheels 
of the carriages, we drank Lord C 's health and ate 



ELIA, AND BRIDGET ELIA. 371 

for our own, in an al fresco style, worthy of Italy. Two 
veritable Bohemians, brown, black-eyed gipsies, the models 
of those I had seen in their wicker tents in Asia, profited 
by the liberality of the hour, and came in for an upper 
crust to a pigeon-pie, that, to tell the truth, they seemed to 
appreciate. 

Race followed race, but I am not a contributor to the 
' Sporting Magazine/ and could not give you their merits 
in comprehensible terms, if I were. 

In one of the intervals, I walked under the king's stand, 
and saw her majesty the queen, and the young Princess 
Victoria, very distinctly. They were listening to a ballad- 
singer, and leaning over the front of the box with an 
amused attention, quite as sincere, apparently, as any 
beggar's in the ring. The princess is much better-looking 
than the pictures of her in the shops, and, for the heir to 
such a crown as that of England, quite unnecessarily pretty 

and interesting. 

# ***** 

Invited to breakfast with a gentleman in the Temple to 
meet Charles Lamb and his sister — f Elia ' and c Bridget 
Elia.' I never in my life had an invitation more to my 
taste. The essays of Elia are certainly the most charming 
things in the world, and it has been for the last ten years 
my highest compliment to the literary taste of a friend to 
present him with a copy. Who has not smiled over the 
humorous description of Mrs. Battle? Who that has read 

* Elia ' would not give more to see him than all the other 
authors of his time put together ? 

I arrived a half hour before Lamb, and had time to 
learn some of his peculiarities. He lives a little out of 
London, and is something of an invalid. Some family 
circumstances have tended to depress him considerably of 
late years, and, unless excited by convivial intercourse, he 
scarce shows a trace of what he was. He was very much 
pleased with the American reprint of his ' Elia/ though it 
contains several things which are not his — written so in 
his style, however, that it is scarce a wonder the editor 
should mistake them. If I recollect right, they were 

* Valentine's Day/ the ' Nuns of Caverswell/ and ■ Twelfth 
Night/ He is excessively given to mystifying his friends* 

2 B ° 



372 PENC1LLINGS BY THE WAY 

and is never so delighted as when he has persuaded some 
©ne into the belief of one of his grave inventions. His 
amusing biographical sketch of Liston was in this vein, and 
ihere was no doubt in any body's mind that it was authen- 
,Kb and written in the most perfect good faith. * Liston 

3 highly enraged with it, and Lamb was delighted in 
^/portion. 

There was a rap at the door at last, and enter a gentle- 
. man in black small-clothes and gaiters, short and very 
slight in his person, his head set on his shoulders with a 
thoughtful, forward bent, his hair just sprinkled with gray,. 
a beautiful deep-set eye, aquiline nose, and a very inde- 
scribable mouth. Whether it expressed most humour or 
feeling, good-nature or a kind of whimsical peevishness, or 
twenty other things which passed over it by turns, I cannot 
in the least be certain. 

His sister, whose literary reputation is associated very 
closely with her brother's, and who, as the original of 
' Bridget Elia/ is a kind of object for literary affection, came 
in after him. She is a small bent figure, evidently a victim 
to ill-health, and hears with difficulty. Her face has been, 
I should think, a fine and handsome one, and her bright 
gray eye is still full of intelligence and fire. They both 
seemed quite at home in our friend's chambers ; and as 
there was to be no one else, we immediately drew round 
the breakfast-table. I had set a large arm-chair for Miss 
Lamb. " Don't take it, Mary," said Lamb, pulling it away 
from her very gravely, " it looks as if you were going to 
have a tooth drawn." 

The conversation was very local. Our host and his 
guest had not met for some weeks, and they had a great 
deal to say of their mutual friends. Perhaps in this way, 
however, I saw more of the author, for his manner of 
speaking of them, and the quaint humour with which he 
complained of one, and spoke we'A of another, was so in the 
vein of his inimitable writings, that I could have fancied 
myself listening to an audible composition of new Elia. 
Nothing could be more delightful than the kindness and 
affection between the brother and the sister, though Lamb 
was continually taking advantage of her deafness to mystify 
iier with the most singular gravity upon every topic that 



ELIA AND BRIDGET* ELIA. 37$ 

was started. ce Poor Mary ! " said he, " she hears all of an 
epigram but the point." ei What are you saying of me, 
Charles ? " she asked. " Mr. Willis," said he, raising his 
voice, " admires your Confessions of a Drunkard very much, 
and I was saying it was no merit of yours that you under- 
stood the subject." We had been speaking of this admir- 
able essay (which is his own) half an hour before. 

The conversation turned upon literature after a while, 
and our host could not express himself strongly enough in 
admiration of Webster's speeches, which he said were ex- 
citing the greatest attention among the politicians and law- 
yers of England. Lamb said, " I don't know much of 
American authors. Mary, there, devours Cooper's novels 
with a ravenous appetite, with which I have no sympathy. 
The only American book I ever read twice, was the ' Jour- 
nal of Edward Woolman/ a quaker preacher, and tailor, 
whose character is one of the finest I ever met with. He 
tells a story or two about negro slaves, that brought the 
tears into my eyes. 1 can read no prose now, though Haz- 
litt sometimes, to be sure — but then Hazlitt is worth all 
modern prose- writers put together." 

Mr. R. spoke of buying a book of Lamb's a few days 
before, and I mentioned my having bought a copy of c Elia* 
the last day I w T as in America, to send as a parting gift to 
one of the most lovely and talented women in our country. 

" What did you give for it ? " said Lamb. 

" About seven and sixpence. " 

cc Permit me to pay you that," said he, and with the 
utmost earnestness he counted out the money upon the 
table. 

" I never yet wrote any thing that would sell," he con- 
tinued. " I am the publisher's ruin. My last poem won't 
sell a copy. Have you seen it, Mr. Willis ? '' 

I had not. 

" It's only eighteen pence, and I'll give you sixpence 
tow r ard it ;" and he described to me where I should find it 
sticking up in a shop-window in the Strand. 

Lamb ate nothing, and complained in a querulous tone 
of the veal-pie. There was a kind of potted fish (of which 
I forget the name at this moment) which he had expected 
our friend would procure for him. He inquired whether 



274i PENCILL1NGS BY THE WAY. 

there was not a morsel left perhaps in the bottom of the 
last pot. Mr. R. was not sure. 

ie Send and see/' said Lamb, <( and if the pot has been 
cleaned, bring me the cover. I think the sight of it would 
do me good/' 

The cover was brought, upon which there was a picture 
of the fish. Lamb kissed it with a reproachful look at his 
friend, and then left the table and began to wander round 
the room with a broken, uncertain step, as if he almost 
forgot to put one leg before the other. His sister rose 
after a while, and commenced walking up and down very- 
much in the same manner on the opposite side of the table^ 
and in the course of half an hour they took their leave. 

To any one who loves the writings of Charles Lamb 
with but half my own enthusiasm, even these little particu- 
lars of an hour passed in his company will have an interest. 
To him who does not, they will seem dull and idle. Wreck 
as he certainly is, and must be, however, of what he was* 
I would rather have seen him for that single hour, than the 
hundred-and-one sights of London put together. 



LETTER XVI. 
JOURNEY TO SCOTLAND. 

IMMENSITY OF LONDON — VOYAGE TO LEITH SOCIETY OF THE 

STEAM-PACKET ANALOGY BETWEEN SCOTCH AND AMERICAN 

MANNERS STRICT OBSERVANCE OF THE SABBATH ON BOARD 

EDINBURGH. 

Sept. 1834. 

Almost giddy with the many pleasures and occupations of 
London, I had outstayed the last fashionable lingerer; and, 
on appearing again, after a fortnight's confinement with 
the epidemic of the season, I found myself almost without 
an acquaintance, and was driven to follow the world. A 
preponderance of letters and friends determined my route 
toward Scotland. 



THE STEAMEic — FELLOW PASSENGERS. 375 

One realizes the immensity of London when he is com- 
pelled to measure its length on a single errand. I took a 
cab at my lodgings at nine in the evening, and drove six 
miles through one succession of crowded and blazing streets 
to the East- India Docks, and, with the single misfortune of 
being robbed on the way of a valuable cloak, secured a 
birth in the Monarch steamer, bound presently for 
Edinburgh. 

I found the drawing-room cabin quite crowded, cold 
supper on the two long tables, everybody very busy with 
knife and fork, and whiskey-and- water and broad Scotch 
circulating merrily. All the world seemed acquainted, and 
each man talked to his neighbour, and it was as unlike a 
ship's company of dumb English as could easily be conceived. 
I had dined too late to attack the solids, but imitating my 
neighbour's potation "of whiskey and hot water, I crowded 
in between two good-humoured Scotchmen, and took the 
happy colour of the spirits of the company. A small centre 
table was occupied by a party who afforded considerable 
amusement. An excessively fat old woman, with a tall 
scraggy daughter and a stubby little old fellow, whom they 
called " Pa ;" and a singular man, a Major Somebody, who 
seemed showing them up, composed the quartette, Noisier 
women I never saw, nor more hideous. They bullied the 
waiter, were facetious with the steward, and talked down 
all the united buzz of the cabin. Opposite me sat a pale, 
severe-looking Scotchman, who had addressed one or two 
remarks to me ; and, upon an uncommon burst of uproari- 
ousnesss, he laughed with the rest, and remarked that the 
iadies were excusable, for they were doubtless Americans, 
and knew no better. 

"It strikes me," said I, " that both in manners and 
accent they are particularly Scotch." 

" Sir ! '* said the pale gentleman. 

u Sir ! " said several of my neighbours on the right 
and left. 

I repeated the remark. 

"Have you ever been in Scotland?" asked the pale 
gentleman, with rather a ferocious air. 

" No, sir ! Have you ever been in America? " 

m No 3 sir ! but 1 have read Mrs. Trollope." 



376 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

ci And I have read Cyril Thornton ; and the manners 
delineated in Mrs. Trollope, I must say, are rather elegant 
in comparison/' 

I particularized the descriptions I alluded to, which will 
occur immediately to those who have read the novel I have 
named ; and then confessing I was an American, an'd with- 
drawing my illiberal remark, which I had only made to 
show the gentleman the injustice and absurdity of his own, 
we called for another tass of whiskey, and became very 
'good friends. Heaven knows I have no prejudice against 
the Scotch, or any other nation— but it is extraordinary 
how universal the feeling seems to be against America. A 
half hour incog, in any mixed company in England I should 
think would satisfy the most rose-coloured doubter on the 
subject* 

We got under weigh at eleven o'clock, and the passengers 
turned in. The next morning was Sunday. It was fortu- 
nately of a " Sabbath stillness -*' and the open sea through 
which we were driving, with an easy south wind in our 
favour, graciously permitted us to do honour to as substan- 
tial a breakfast as ever was set before a traveller, even in 
America. (Why rve should be ridiculed for our breakfasts, 
I do not know.) 

The " Monarch " is a superb boat, and, with the aid of 
sails, and a wind right aft, we made twelve miles in the 
hour easily. I was pleased to see an observance of the 
Sabbath, which had not crossed my path before in three 
years' travel Half the passengers at least took their Bibles 
after breakfast, and devoted an hour or two evidently to grave 
religious reading and reflection. With this exception, I 
have not seen a person with the Bible in his hand, in travel- 
ling over half the world. 

The weather continued fine, and smooth water tempted 
us up to breakfast again on Monday. The wash-room was 
full of half-clad men, but the week-day manners of the 
passengers were perceptibly gayer. The captain honoured 
us by taking the head of the table, which he had not done 
on the day previous, and his appearance was hailed by three 
general cheers. When the meats were removed, a gentle- 
man rose, and, after a very long and parliamentary speech 
proposed the health of Captain B- • — The company stood 



EDINBURGH. 377 

up, ladies and all, and it was drunk with a tremendous 
" hip-hip-hurrah," in bumpers of whiskey ! 

We rounded St. Abb's Head into the Forth at five in the 
afternoon,, and soon dropped anchor off Leith. The view 
of Edinburgh, from the water, is, I think, second only to 
that of Constantinople. The singular resemblance, in one 
or two features, to the view of Athens as you approach from 
the Piraeus, seems to have struck other eyes than mine ; and 
an imitation Acropolis is commenced on the Calton-HilJ, 
and has already, in its half-finished state, much the effect 
of the Parthenon. Hymettus is rather loftier than the 
Pentland-hills, and Pentelicus farther off and grander than. 
Arthur's seat ; but the Old Castle of Edinburgh is a noble 
and peculiar feature of its own, and soars up against the 
sky, with its pinnacle-placed turrets, superbly magnificent. 
The Forth has a high shore on either side, and, with the 
island of Inchkeith'in its broad bosom, it looks more like a 
lake than an arm of the sea. 

It is odd what strange links of acquaintance will develope 
between people thrown together in the most casual manner, 
and in the most out-of-the-way places. 1 have never entered 
a steam boat in my life without finding, if not an acquaint- 
ance, some one who should have been an acquaintance from 
mutual knowledge of friends. I thought, through the first 
day, that the Monarch would be an exception. On the 
second morning, however, a gentleman came up and called 
me by name. He was an American, and had seen me in 
Boston. Soon after, another gentleman addressed some 
remark to me, and, in a few minutes, we discovered that 
we were members of the same club in London, and bound 
to the same hospitable roof in Scotland. We went on talking 
together, and I happened to mention having lately been in 
Greece, when one of a large party of ladies, over-hearing 

the remark, turned, and asked me, if I had met Lady 

in my travels. I had met her at Athens, and this was her 
sister. I found I had many interesting particulars of the 
person in question which were new to them, and, sequiinr, 
a friendship struck up immediately between me and a party 
of six. You would have never dreamed, to have seen the 
adieux on the landing, that we had been unaware of each 
other's existence forty -four hours previous. Leith is a mil© 



578 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

or more from the town, and we drove into the new side of 
Edinburgh — a splendid city of stone — and, with my English 
friend, I was soon installed in a comfortable parlour at 
Douglas's — an hotel, to which the Tremont, in Boston, is 
the only parallel. It is built of the same stone and is smaller, 
but it has a better situation than the Tremont, standing in 
a magnificent square, with a column and statue to Lord 
Melville in the centre, and a perspective of a noble street 
stretching through the city from the opposite side. 

We dined upon grouse, to begin Scotland fairly, and nailed 
down our sherry with a tass o* Glenlivet, and then we had 
still an hour of daylight for a ramble. 



LETTER XVII. 
EDINBURGH. 

A SCOTCH BREAKFAST THE CASTLE PALACE OF HOLYROOD— 

QUEEN MARY RIZZIO — CHARLES THE TENTH. 

Sept. 1834. 

It is an odd place, Edinburgh. The Old Town and the New 
are separated by a broad and deep ravine, planted with trees 
and shrubbery ; and across this, on a level with the streets 
on either side, stretches a bridge of a most giddy height, 
without which all communication would apparently be cut 
off. " Auld Reekie " itself looks built on the back-bone of 
a ridgy crag, and towers along on the opposite side of the 
ravine, running up its twelve-story houses to the sky in 
an ascending curve, till it terminates in the frowning and 
battlemented Castle, whose base is literally on a mountain- 
top in the midst of the city. At the foot of this ridge, in 
the lap of the valley, lies Holyrood House ; and between 
this and the Castle runs a single street, part of which is the 
Old Canongate. Princes' Street, the Broadway of the New- 
Town, is built along the opposite edge of the ravine facing 
the long, many-windowed walls of the Canongate, and from 



"EDINBURGH. 379' 

every part of Edinburgh these singular features are con- 
spicuously visible. A more striking contrast than exists 
between these two parts of the same city could hardly be 
imagined. On one side a succession of splendid squares, 
elegant granite houses, broad and well-paved streets, columns, 
statues, and clean side-walks, thinly promenaded and by the 
well-dressed exclusively — a kind of wholly grand and half- 
deserted city, which has been built too ambitiously for its 
population; — and, on the other, an antique wilderness of 
streets and " wynds," so narrow and lofty as to shut out 
much of the light of heaven ; a thronging, busy, and particu- 
larly dirty population ; side- walks almost impassable from 
children and other respected nuisances : and altogether, 
between the irregular and massive architecture, and the 
unintelligible jargon agonizing the air about you, a most 
outlandish and strange city. Paris is not more unlike Con- 
stantinople than one side of Edinburgh is unlike the other. 
Nature has properly placed "a great gulf" between them. 

We toiled up to the Castle to see the sunset. Oh, but it 
was beautiful! I have no idea of describing it; but Edin- 
burgh, to me, will be a picture seen through an atmosphere 
of powdered gold, mellow as an eve on the Campagna. We 
looked down on the surging sea of architecture below us ; 
and whether it was the wavy cloudiness of a myriad of 
reeking chimneys, or whether it was a fancy, Glenlivet- 
born, in my eye, the city seemed to me like a troop of war 
horses rearing into the air with their gallant riders. The 
singular boldness of the hills on which it is built, and of the 
crags and mountains which look down upon it, and the 
impressive lift of its towering architecture into the sky, 
give it altogether a look of pride and warlikeness that 
answers peculiarly to the chivalric history of Scotland. 
And so much for the first look at " Auld Reekie." 

My friend had determined to have what he called a 
" flare-up " of a Scotch breakfast, and we were set down 
the morning after our arrival, at nine, to cold grouse, 
salmon, cold beef, marmalade, jellies, honey, five kinds of 
bread, oatmeal cakes, coffee, tea, and toast ; and I am by 
no means sure that this is all. It is a fine country in which 
one gets so much by the simple order of "breakfast at 
nine." 



380 PENCILLING** BY THE WAY. 

We parted after having achieved it, my companion going 
before me to Dumbartonshire ; and, with a ei wee callant " 
for a guide, I took my way to Holyrood. 

At the very foot of Edinburgh stands this most interest- 
ing of royal palaces — a fine old pile, though at ,the first 
view rather disappointing. It might have been in the sky, 
which was dun and cold, or it might have been in the 
melancholy story most prominent in its history, but it 
oppressed me with its gloom. A rosy cicerone in petticoats 
stepped out from the porter's lodge, and rather brightened 
mv mood with her smile and courtesv, and I followed on 
to the chapel-royal, built, Heaven knows when, but in a 
beautiful state of Gothic ruin. The girl went on with her 
knitting and her well- drilled recitation of the sights upon 
which those old fretted and stone traceries had let in the 
light : and I walked about feeding my eyes upon its hoar 
and touching beauty, listening little till she came to the 
high aitar, and in the same broad Scotch monotone, and 
with her eyes still upon her work, hurried over something 
about the Queen of Scots. Mary was married to Darnley 
on the spot where I stood) The mechanical guide was 
accustomed evidently to an interruption here, and stood 
silent a minute or two to give my surprise the usual grace. 
Poor, poor Mary ! I had the common feeling, and made 
probably the same ejaculation that thousands have made on 
the spot, but 1 had never before realized the melancholy 
romance of her life half so nearly. It had been the sadness 
of an hour before — a feeling laid aside with the book that 
recorded it — now it was, as it were, a pity and a grief for 
the living, and 1 felt struck with it as if it had happened 
yesterday. If Rizzio's harp had sounded from her chamber, 
it could not have seemed more tangibly a scene of living 
story. 

" And through this door they dragged the murdered 
favourite ; and here, under this stone, he was buried ! " 

« Yes, Sir." 

ic Poor Rizzio ! " 

" I m thinkin that 's a, Sir ! " 

It was a broad hint, but I took another turn down the 
nave of the old ruin, and another look at the scene of the 
murder and the grave of the victim. 



fTOLYROOD PALACE. 381 

And this door communicated with Mary's apartments?" 

" Yes — ye hae it a* the noo ! " 

I paid my shilling, and exit. 

On inquiry for the private apartments, I was directed to 
another Girzy, who took me up to a suite of rooms appro- 
priated to the use of the Earl of Bredalbane, and furnished 
very much like lodgings for a guinea a week in London. 

" And which was Queen Mary's chamber ? " 

" Ech ! Sir; it's t' ither side. I dinna show that." 

f< And what am I brought here for ? " 

w Ye cam' yoursel' ! " 

With this wholesome truth I paid my shilling again, and 
was handed over to another woman, who took me into a 
large hall containing portraits of Robert Bruce, Baliol, 
Macbeth, Queen Mary, and some forty other men and 
women famous in Scotch story 3 and nothing is clearer 
than that one patient person sat to the painter for the 
whole. After ci doing " these, I was led with extreme 
deliberativeness through a suite of unfurnished rooms, — 
twelve, I think, — the only interest of which was their 
having been tenanted of late by the royal exile of France ; 
as if any body would give a shilling to see where Charles 
X. slept and breakfasted ! 

I thanked Heaven that I had stumbled next upon the 
right person, and was introduced into an ill-lighted room, 
with one deep window looking upon the courts and a fire- 
place like that of a country inn — the state-chamber of the 
unfortunate Mary. Here was a chair she embroidered — 
there was a seat of tarnished velvet, where she sat in state 
with Darnley — the very grate in the chimney that she had 
sat before — the mirror in which her fairest face had been 
imaged — the table at which she had worked — the walls on 
which her eyes had rested in her gay and her melancholy 
hours — all, save the touch and mould of time, as she lived 
in it and left it. It was a place for a thousand thoughts. 

The woman led on. We entered another room — her 
chamber. A small, low bed, with tattered hangings of red 
and figured silk, tall, ill-shapen posts, and altogether a 
paltry look, stood in a room of irregular shape; and here, 
in all her peerless beauty, she had slept. A small cabinet, 
a closet merely, opened on the right, and in this she was 



382 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

supping with Rizzio, when he was plucked from her and 
murdered. We went back to the audience-chamber to see 
the stain of his blood on the floor. She partitioned it off 
after his death, not bearing to look upon it. Again — ** poor 
Mary!" 

On the opposite side was a similar closet, which served 
as her dressing-room, and the small mirror, scarce larger 
than your hand, which she used at her toilet. Oh for a 
magic wand, to wave back, upon that senseless surface, the 
visions of beautv it has reflected ! 



LETTER XVIII. 
A VISIT TO D CASTLE. 

ROMANCE AND REALITY — DALKEITH RAILWAY RECEPTION AT 

D CASTLE — COMPARISONS- 
LEGENDS — THE WARLOCK PEAR. 



D CASTLE — COMPARISONS D " POLICIES" FAMILY 



Sept. 1854. 

Edinburgh has extended to St. Leonard's, and the home 
of Jeanie Deans is now the commencement of the railway ! 
How sadly is romance ridden over by the march of intel- 
lect ! 

With twenty-four persons and some climbers behind, I 
was drawn ten miles in the hour by a single horse upon 

the Dalkeith rail-road, and landed within a mile of D 

Castle. Two " wee callants " here undertook my portman- 
teau, and in ten minutes more I was at the rustic lodge in 
the park, the gate of which swung hospitably open with the 
welcome announcement that I was expected. An avenue of 
near three-quarters of a mile of firs, cedars, laburnums, and 
larches, wound through the park to the Castle ; and, dip- 
ping over the edge of a deep and wild dell, I found the 
venerable old pile below me, its round towers and battle- 
mented turrets frowning among the trees, and forming 
with the river, which swept round its base, one of the 



D CASTLE. 383 

finest specimens imaginable of the feudal picturesque.* The 
nicely-gravelled terraces, as I approached $ the plate-glass 
windows and rich curtains, diminished somewhat of the 
romance ; but I am not free to say that the promise they* 
gave of the luxury within did not offer a succedaneum. 

I was met at the threshold by the castle's noble and dis- 
tinguished master; and as the light modern Gothic door 
swung open on its noiseless hinges, I looked up at the rude 
armorial scutcheon above, and at the slits for the portcullis 
chains and the rough hollows in the walls which had served 
for its rest, and it seemed to me that the kind and polished 
earl, in his velvet cap, and the modern door on its patent 
hinges, were pleasant substitutes even for a raised draw- 
bridge and a helmeted knight- I beg pardon of the romantic, 
if this be treason against Delia Crusca. 

The gong had sounded its first summons to dinner, and I 
went immediately to my room to achieve my toilet. I found 
myself in the south wing, w T ith a glorious view up the 
valley of the Esk, and comforts about me such as are only- 
found in a private chamber in England. The nicely-fitted 
carpet ; the heavy curtains ; the well-appointed dressing- 
table ; the patent grate and its blazing fire, (for where is a 
fire not welcome in Scotland ?) the tapestry, the books, the 
boundless bed, the bell that will ring, and the servants that 
anticipate the pull — oh, you should have pined for comfort 
in France and Italy to know what this catalogue is worth. 

After dinner, Lady D , who is much of an invalid, 

mounted a small pony to show me the grounds. We took 
a winding path away from the door, and descended at once 
into the romantic dell over which the castle towers. it is 
naturally a most wild and precipitous glen, through which 
the rapid Esk pursues its way almost in darkness 3 but, 
leaving only the steep and rocky shelves leaning over the 
river with their crown of pines, the successive lords of 

D have cultivated the banks and hills around for a 

park and a paradise. The smooth gravel-walks cross and 
interweave ; the smoother lawns sink and swell with their 
green bosoms ; the stream dashes on murmuring below, and 

* " The castle of D upon the South Esk is a strong and large castle, with 

a large wall of aslure work going round about the same, with a tower upon ilk. 
corner thereof."— Grose's Antiquities 



384 PENC1LLINGS BY THE WAY. 

the lofty trees shadow and overhang all. At one extremity 
of the grounds are a flower and fruit garden, and beyond it 
the castle farm ; at the other, a little village of the family 
dependants, with their rose-embowered cottages ; and, as 
far as you would ramble in a day, extend the woods and 
glades ; and hares leap across your path, and pheasants and 
partridges whirr up as you approach, and you may fatigue 
yourself in a scene that is formed in every feature for the 
gentle-born and the refined. The labour and the taste of 
successive generations can alone create such an Eden. 

The various views of the castle from the bottom of the 
dell are perfectly beautiful. With all its internal refine- 
ment, it is still the warlike fortress at a little distance ; and 
bartizan and battlement bring bold]}'- back the days when 
Bruce was at Hawthorne! en, (six miles distant) and Lord 

D 's ancestor defended the ford of the Esk, and made 

himself a name in Scottish story in the days of Wallace 

and the Douglasses. D was besieged by Edward the 

First and by John of Gaunt, among others, and, being the 
nearest of a chain of castles from the Esk to the Pentland 
Hills, it was the scene of some pretty fighting in most of 
the wars of Scotland. 

Lord D showed me a singular old bridle-bit, the his- 
tory of which is thus told in Scott's ' Tales of a Grand- 
father :' — 

" Sir Alexander Ramsay having taken by storm the 
strong castle of Roxburgh, the king bestowed on him the 
office of sheriff of the countv, which was before engaged 
by the knight of Liddesdale. As this was placing another 
person in his room, the knight of Liddesdale altogether 
forgot his old friendship for Ramsay, and resolved to put 
him to death. He came suddenly upon him with a strong 
party of men while he was administering justice at Hawick. 
Ramsay, having no suspicion of injury from the hands of 
his old comrade, and having few men with him, was easily 
overpowered; and, being wounded, was hurried away to 
the lonely castle of the Hermitage, which stands in the 
middle of the morasses of Liddesdale. Here he was thrown 
into a dungeon, with his horse, where he had no other 
sustenance than some grain which fell down from a granary 
above ; and, after lingering a while in that dreadful con- 



LEGENDS OF D 385 

dition, the brave Sir Alexander Ramsay died, This was in 
1412. Nearly four hundred and fifty years afterward — 
that is, about forty years ago, a mason, digging among the 
ruins of Hermitage Castle, broke into a dungeon, where 
lay a quantity of chaff, some human bones, and a bridle-bit, 
which were supposed to mark the vault as the place of 
Ramsay's death. The bridle-bit was given to grandpapa, 

who presented it to the present gallant Earl of D , a 

brave soldier, like his ancestor, Sir Alexander Ramsay, 
from whom he is lineally descended." 

There is another singular story connected with the family 
which escaped Sir Walter, and which has never appeared 

in print. Lady D is of the ancient family of 

C , one of the ancestors of which married the daughter 

of the famous Warlock of GifFord, described in ' Marmion/ 
As they were proceeding to the church, the wizard lord 
stopped the bridal procession beneath a pear-tree, and pluck- 
ing one of the pears, he gave it to his daughter, telling her 
that he had no dowry to give her, but that as long as she 
kept that gift, good fortune would never desert her or her 
descendants. This was in 12?0 ; and the pear is still pre- 
served in a silver box. About two centuries ago, a maiden 
lady of the family chose to try her teeth upon it, and very 
soon after, two of the best farms of the estate were lost in 
some litigation — the only misfortune that has befallen the 
inheritance of the C 's in six centuries — thanks, per- 
haps, to the Warlock pear ! 



LETTER XIX, 



D CASTLE. 

SPORTING AND ITS EQUIPMENTS — ROSLIN CASTLE AND CHAPEL 

A CICERONE. 

Sept. 1834. 

The nominal attraction of Scotland, particularly at this 
season, is the shooting. Immediately on your arrival, vou 

AC 



386 PEMCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

rare asked whether you prefer a flint or a percussion lock, 
and, supposing that you do not travel with a gun, which all 
Englishmen do) a double-barrelled Manton is appropriated 
to your use, the gamekeeper fills your powder and shot- 
pouches, and waits with the dogs in a leash till you have 
done your breakfast ; and the ladies leave the table, wishing 
you a good day's sport, — all as matters of course. 

I would rather have gone to the library. An aversion to 
.walking, except upon smooth flag- stones, a poetical tender- 
ness on the subject of " putting birds out of misery/' as thf 
last office is elegantly called, and hands much more at home 
with a goose-quill than a gun, were some of my private 
objections to the " order of the day." Between persuasion 
and a most truant sunshine, I was overruled, however, and, 
with a silent prayer that I might not destroy the hopes of 
my noble host, by shooting his only son, who was to be my 
companion and instructor, I shouldered the proffered Man- 
ton and joined the gamekeeper in the park. 

Lord R and his man looked at me with some aston- 
ishment as I approached, and I was equally surprised at the 
young nobleman's metamorphosis. From the elegant Ox- 
onian I had seen at breakfast, he was transformed to a 
figure something rougher than his Highland dependant, in 
a woollen shooting-jacket, that might have been cut in 
Kentucky ; pockets of any number and capacity ; trowsers 
3>f the coarsest plaid ; hob-nailed shoes and leather gaiters, 
and a manner of handling his gun that would have been 
respected on the Mississippi. My own appearance in high- 
heeled French boots and other corresponding gear for a 
tramp over stubble and marsh, amused them equally ; but 
my wardrobe was exclusively metropolitan, and there was 
no alternative. 

The dogs were loosed from their leash, and bounded 
away, and, crossing the Esk under the castle walls, we 
found our way out of the park, and took to the open fields 
A large patch of stubble was our first ground, and with a 
<f hie away ! " from the gamekeeper, the beautiful setters 
darted on before, their tails busy with delight and their 
noses to the ground, first dividing, each for a wall-side, and 
beating along till they met, and then scouring toward the 
centre, as regularly as if every step were guided by human 



A SHOOTING PARTY, 387 

reason. Suddenly they both dropped low into the stubble, 
and with heads eagerly bent forward and the intensest gaze 
upon a spot, a yard or more in advance, stood as motionless 
as stone. " A covey, my Lord ! " said the gamekeeper, and, 
with our guns cocked, we advanced to the dogs, who had 
crouched, and lay as still, while we passed them, as if their 
lives depended upon our shot. Another step, and whirr! 
whirr ! a dozen partridges started up from the furrow ; and 

while Lord R cried " Now ! " and reserved his fire to 

give me the opportunity, I stood stock-still in my surprise, 
and the whole covey disappeared over the wall. My friend 
laughed, the gamekeeper smiled, and the dogs hied on once 
more. 

I mended my shooting in the course of the morning, but 
it was both exciting and hard work. A heavy shower 
soaked us through, without exciting the slightest notice of 
my companion ; and on we trudged through peas, beans, 
turnips, and corn, muddied to the knees, and smoking with 
moisture, excessively to the astonishment, I doubt not, of 
the productions of Monsieur Clerx, of the Rue Vivisnne, 
which were reduced to- the consistency of brown paper, and 
those of my London tailor, which were equally entitled to 
some surprise at the use they were put to. It was quite 
beautiful, however, to see the ardour and training of the 
dogs ; their caution, their obedience, and their perfect under- 
standing of every motion of their master. I found myself 
interested quite beyond fatigue ; and it was only when we 
jumped the park-paling and took it once more leisurely 
down the gravel- walks, that I realized at what an expense 
of mud, water, and weariness, my day's sport had been 
purchased. — Mem. Never to come to Scotland again with- 
out hob-nailed shoes and a shooting jacket. 

****** 

Rode over to Roslin Castle. The country between D 

Castle and Roslin, including the village of Lasswade, is of 
uncommon loveliness. Lasswade itself clings to the two sides 
of a small valley, with its village-church buried in trees, 
and the country-seat of Lord Melville looking down upon 
it from its green woods ; and away over the shoulder of the 
lull swell the forests and rocks which embosom Hawthorn- 
den, (the residence of Drummond the poet^ in the days of 

2 c 2 



388 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 



13en Jonson) and the Pentland hills with their bold outline, 
form a background that completes the picture. We left our 
horses at the neighbouring inn, and walked first to Roslin 
chapel. This little gem of florid architecture is scarcely a 
ruin, so perfect are its arches and pillars, its fretted cprnices 
and its painted windows. A whimsical booby undertook 
the cicerone, with a long cane-pole to point out the beauties. 
We entered the low side door, whose stone threshold 
the feet of Cromwell's church- stabled troopers assisted to 
wear, and walked at once to a singular column of twisted 
marble, most curiously carved, standing under the choir. 
Our friend with the cane-pole, who had condescended to 
familiar Scotch on the way, took his distance from the base, 
and drawing up his feet like a soldier on drill, assumed a 
most extraordinary elevation of voice, and recited its history 
in a declamation of which I could only comprehend the 
words " Awbraham and Isaac." I saw by the direction of 
the pole that there was a bas-relief of the Father of the 
Faithful, done on the capital, but for the rest I was indebted 

to Lord R ,who did it into English as follows:—" The 

master-mason of this chapel, meeting with some difficulties 
in the execution of his design, found it necessary to go to 
Rome for information, during which time his apprentice 
carried on the work, and even executed some parts concern- 
ing which his master had been most doubtful ; particularly 
this fine-fluted column, ornamented with wreaths of foliage 
and flowers twisting spirally round it. The master on his 
return, stung with envy at this proof of the superior abilities 
of bis apprentice, slew him by a blow of his hammer." 

The whole interior of the chapel is excessively rich. The 
roof, capitals, key-stones, and architraves are covered with 
sculptures. On the architrave adjoining the apprentice's 
pillar to a smaller one, is engraved the sententious inscrip- 
tion, u Forte est vinum, fortior est rex, fortiorcs sunt 
mulieres ; super omnia vlncit Veritas" It has been built 
about four hundred years, and is, I am told, the most perfect 
thing of its kind in Scotland. 

The ruins of Roslin Castle are a few minutes walk 
beyond. They stand on a kind of island rock in the midst 
of one of the wildest glens of Scotland, separated from the 
hill nearest to the base by a drawbridge, swung over a 



. 



WILLIAM ST. CLAIR FEUDAL STATE. 389 

tremendous chasm. I have seen nothing so absolutely 
picturesque in my travels. The North Esk runs its dark 
course, unseen, in the ravine below ; the rocks on every 
side frown down upon it in black shadows ; the woods 
are tangled and apparently pathless; and were it not for a 
most undeniable two-story farm house, built directly in the 
court of the old castle, you might convince yourself that foot 
had never approached it since the days of Wallace. 

The fortress was built by William St. Clair, of whom 
Grose writes: " He kept a great court, and was royally 
served at his own table in vessels of gold and silver; Lord 
Dirleton being his master-house-hold ; Lord Borthwick his 
cupbearer ; and Lord Fleming his carver ; in whose absence 
they had deputies to attend, — viz. : Stewart, Laird of 
Drurnlanrig; Tweddie, Laird of Drumerline ; and Sandi- 
lands, Laird of Calder. He had his halls and other apart- 
ments richly adorned with embroidered hangings. He 
flourished in the reigns of James I. and II. His princess, 
Elizabeth Douglas, was served by seventy-five gentle- 
women, whereof fifty-three were daughters of noblemen, 
all clothed in velvet s and silks, with their chains of gold 
and other ornaments, and was attended by two hundred 
riding gentlemen in all her journies ; and, if it happened to 
be dark when she went to Edinburgh, where her lodgings 
were at the foot of the Black Fryars' Wynd, eighty lighted 
torches were carried before her." 

With a scrambling walk up the glen, which is, assays 
truly Mr. Grose, "inconceivably romantick/' we returned 

to our horses, and rode back to our dinner at D , 

delighted with Roslin Castle and uncommonly hungry. 



390 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY, 

LETTER XX. 
EDINBURGH. 

" CHRISTOPHER NORTH*' MR. BLACKWOOD THE ETTRICK SHEP- 
HERD LOCKHART ' NOCTES AMBROSIANJ&' WORDSWORTH — 

SOUTHEY — CAPTAIN HAMILTON AND HIS BOOK ON AMERICA. 

Sept. 1834. 

One of my most valued letters to Scotland was an introduc- 
tion to Professor W , the " Christopher North" of 

Blackwood, and the well-known poet. The acknowledge- 
ment of the reception of my note came with an invitation 
to breakfast the following morning, at the early hour of 
nine. 

The professor's family were at a summer residence in the 
country, and he was alone in his house in Gloucester-place., 
having come to town en the melancholy errand of a visit to 
poor Blackwood — (since dead). I was punctual to my hour, 
and found the poet standing before the fire with his coat- 
skirts expanded — a large, muscular man, something slovenly 
in his dress, but with a manner and face of high good- 
humour, and remarkably frank and prepossessing address. 
While he was finding me a chair, and saying civil things of 
the noble Friend who had been the medium of our acquaint- 
ance, I was trying to reconcile my idea of him, gathered 
from portraits and descriptions, with the person before me. 
I had imagined a thinner and more scholar-like looking 
man, with a much paler face, and a much more polished, 
exterior. His head is exceedingly ample, his eye blue and 
restless, his mouth full of character ; and his hair, of a very 
light sandy colour, is brushed up to cover an incipient bald- 
ness, but takes very much its own way, and has the wild- 
ness of a Highlander's. He has the stamp upon him of a 
remarkable man to a degree seldom seen, and is, on the whole, 
fine-looking, and certainly a gentleman in his appearance; 
but (I know not whether the impression is common) I 
expected in Christopher North a finished and rather over- 
refined man of the world, of the old school, and I was so 
far disappointed. 



CHRISTOPHER NORTH. SQl 

The tea was made, and the breakfast smoked upon the 
table, but the professor showed no signs of being aware of 
the fact, and talked away famously, getting up and sitting 
down, walking to the window and standing before the fire, 
and apparently carried quite away with his own too rapic 
process of thought. He talked of the American poets, 
praised Percival and Pierpont more particularly ; expressed 
great pleasure at the criticisms of his own works that had 
appeared in the American papers and magazines — and still 
the toast was getting cold, and with every move he seemed 
less and less aware of the presence of breakfast. There were 
plates and cups for but two, so that he was not waiting for 
another guest; and after half an hour had thus elapsed, I 
began to fear he thought he had already breakfasted 
If I had wished to remind him of it, however, I 
should have had no opportunity, for the stream of his elo- 
quence ran on without a break ; and eloquence it certainlv 
was. His accent is very broadly Scotch, but his words are 
singularly well chosen, and his illustrations more novel and 
poetical than those of any man I ever conversed with. He 
spoke of Blackw T ood; returning to the subject repeatedly, 
and always with a softened tone of voice and a more impres- 
sive manner, as if his feelings were entirely engrossed by 
the circumstances of his illness. " Poor Blackwood !' he 
said setting his hands together, and fixing his eyes on the 
wall, cs if he were soliloquizing with the picture of the sick 
man vividly before him " there never was a more honest 
creature or a better friend. I have known him intimately 
for years, and owe him much, and I could lose no friend 
that would affect me more nearly. There is something quite 
awful in the striking down thus of a familiar companion by 
your side — the passing away — the death — the end for ever 
of a man you have been accustomed to meet as surely as the 
morning or evening, and have grown to consider a part of 
your existence almost; — to have the share he took in your 
thoughts thrown back upon you — and his aid and counsel 
and company with you no more ! His own mind is in a 
very singular state. He knows he is to die, and he has made 
every preparation in the most composed and sensible manner, 
and if the subject is alluded to directly, does not even ex- 
press a hope of recovery; yet, the moment the theme is 



392 PENCILLINGS BY T&E WAY. 

changed, he talks as if death were as far from him as ever, 
and looks forward, and mingles himself up in his remarks on 
the future, as if he were to be here to see this and the other 
thing completed, and share with you the advantage for years 
to come. What a strange thing it is — this balancing between 
death and life — standing on the edge of the grave, and 
turning, first to look into its approaching darkness, and 
then back upon the familiar and pleasant world, yet with 
a certain downward progress, and no hope of life beyond 
the day over your head !" 

I asked if Blackwood was a man of refined literary taste. 

"Yes," he said, " I would trust his opinion of a book 
sooner than that of any man I know. He might not pub- 
lish every thing he approved, for it was his business to 
print only things that would sell ; and, therefore, there are 
perhaps many authors who would complain of him ; but, if 
his opinion had been against my own, and it had been my 
own book, I should believe he was right, and give up my 
own judgment. He was a patron of literature, and it owes 
him much. He is a loss to the world." 

I spoke of the c Noctes/ 

He smiled, as you would suppose Christopher North 
would do, with the twinkle proper of genuine hilarity in 
his eye, and said, ic Yes, they have been very popular. 
Many people in Scotland believe them to be transcripts of 
real scenes, and wonder how a professor of moral philosophy 
can descend to such carousings ; and poor Hogg comes in 
for his share of abuse, for they never doubt he was there, 
and said every thing that is put down for him.'' 

" How does the Shepherd take it ? * 

ci Very good-humouredly, with the exception of one or 
two occasions, when cockney scribblers have visited him in 
their tours, and tried to flatter him by convincing him he 
was treated disrespectfully. But five minutes' conversation 
and two words of banter restore his good-humour, and he 
is convinced, as he ougnt to be, that he owes half his repu- 
tation to the ' Noctes/'' 

u What do you think of his ' Life of Sir Walter/ which 
Lockhart has so butchered in Fraser ?" 

" Did Lockhart write that ? " 

u I was assured so in London." 



lockhart's attack on HOGG. 393 

u It was a barbarous and unjustifiable attack ; and, oddly 
enough, I said so yesterday to Lockhart himself, who was 
here, and he differed from me entirely. Now you mention 
it, I think, from his manner, he must have written it." 

" Will Hogg forgive him ? " 

" Never ! never ! I do not think he knows yet who has 
done it, but I hear that he is dreadfully exasperated. Lock- 
hart is quite wrong. To attack an old man, with gray hairs, 
like the Shepherd, and accuse him so flatly and unneces- 
sarily of lie upon lie — oh, it was not right !" 

" Do you think Hogg misrepresented facts wilfully? " 

" No, oh no ! he is perfectly honest, no doubt, and quite 
revered Sir Walter. He has an unlucky inaccuracy of 
mind, however ; and his own vanity, which is something 
quite ridiculous, has given a colouring to his conversations 
with Scott, which put them in a very false light ; and Sir 
Walter, who was the best-natured of men, may have said 
the things ascribed to him in a variety of moods, such as 
no one can understand who does not know what a bore 
Hogg must sometimes have been at Abbotsford. Do you 
know Lockhart ? " 

" No, I do not. He is almost the only literary man in 
London I have not met; and I must say, as the editor of 
the 'Quarterly/ and the most unfair and unprincipled critic 
of the day, I have no wish to know him. I never heard 
him well spoken of. I probably have met a hundred of his 
acquaintances, but I have not yet seen one who pretended: 
to be his friend." 

"Yet there is a great deal of good in Lockhart. If he 
were sitting there, opposite you, you would find him the 
mildest and most unpresuming of men, and so he appears in 
private life always." 

" Not always. A celebrated foreigner, who had been 
very intimate with him, called one morning to deprecate 
Ms severity upon Baron D'Haussez's book in a forthcoming 
review. He did his errand in a friendly way, and, on tak- 
ing his leave, Lockhart, with much ceremony, accompanied 
him down to his carriage. c Pray don't give yourself the 
trouble to come down/ said the polite Frenchman. ' I 
make a point of doing it, Sir/ said Lockhart, with a very 
offensive manner, ' for I understand from your friend's book 



39^ PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

that we are not considered a polite nation in France. 
Nothing certainly could be more ill-bred and insulting." 

" Still it is not in his nature. I do believe that it 19 
merely an unhappy talent he has for sarcasm, with which 
his heart has nothing to do. When he sits down to review 
a book, he never thinks of the author or his feelings. He 
cuts it up with pleasure, because he does it with skill in 
the way of his profession, as a surgeon dissects a dead body. 
He would be the first to show the man a real kindness if 
ihe stood before him. I have known Lockhart long. He 
was in Edinburgh a great while ; and when he was writing 
e Valerius,' we were in the habit of walking out together 
every morning, and when we reached a quiet spot in the 
country, he read to me the chapters as he wrote them. He 
finished it in three weeks. I heard it all thus by piecemeal 
as it went on, and had much difficulty in persuading him 
that it was worth publishing. He wrote it very rapidly, 
and thought nothing of it. We used to sup together with 
Blackwood, and that was the real origin of the ' Noctes.' " 

'- At Ambrose's ? " 

" At Ambroses.'' 

" But is there such a tavern, really ? " 

c ' Oh, certainly. Any body will show it to you. It is 
a small house ; kept in an out-of-the-way corner of the 
town, by Ambrose, who is an excellent fellow in his way, 
and has had a great influx of custom in consequence of his 
celebrity in the c Noctes/ We were there one night very 
late, and had all been remarkably gay and agreeable. f What 
a pity/ said Lockhart, ' that some short-hand writer had 
not been here to take down the good things that have been 
said at this supper!' The next day he produced a paper 
called ' Noctes Ainbrosioxwd,' and that was the first. I con- 
tinued them afterward." 

" Have you no idea of publishing them separately ? I 
think a volume or two should be made of the more poetical 
and critical parts, certainly. Leaving out the politics, and 
the merely local topics of the day, no book could be more 
agreeable." 

"It was one of the things pending when poor Blackwood 
was taken ill. But, will you have some breakfast ? " 

The breakfast had been cooling r or an hour, and I most 






WORDSWORTH. 3Q5 



willingly acceded to his proposition. Without rising, he 
leaned back with his chair still toward the fire, and, seizing 
the tea-pot as if it were a sledge-hammer, he poured from 
one cup to the other without interrupting the stream, over- 
running both cup and saucer, and partly flooding the tea- 
tray. He then set the cream toward me with a careless- 
ness which nearly overset it, and, in trying to reach an egg 
from the centre of the table, broke two. He took no notice 
of his own awkwardness, but drank his cup of tea at a 
single draught, ate his egg in the same expeditious manner, 
and went on talking of the ' Noctes/ and Lockhart, and 
Blackwood, as if eating his breakfast were rather a trouble- 
some parenthesis in his conversation. After a while he 
digressed to Wordsworth and Sou they, and asked me if I 
was going to return by the Lakes. I proposed doing so. 

" I will give you. letters to both, if you haven't them. I 
lived a long time in that neighbourhood, and know Words- 
worth perhaps as well as any one. Many a day 1 have 
walked over the hills with him, and listened to his repeti- 
tion of his own poetry, which of course filled my mind com- 
pletely at the time, and perhaps started the poetical vein in 
me, though I cannot agree with the critics that my poetry 
is an imitation of Wordsworth's." 

u Did Wordsworth repeat any other poetry than his: 



" Never in a single instance, to my knowledge. He is 
remarkable for the manner in which he is wrapped up in 
his own poetical life. He thinks of nothing else. Every 
thing ministers to it. Every thing is done with reference 
to it. He is all and only a poet." 

" What is Southey's manner of life ? " 

ei Walter Scott said of him, that he lived too much withi 
women. He is secluded in the country, and surrounded 
by a circle of admiring friends, who glorify every literary 
project he undertakes, and persuade him, in spite of his 
natural modesty, that he can do nothing wrong or imper- 
fectly. He has great genius, and is a most estimable man.'* 

' l Hamilton lives on the Lakes too — does he not ? " 

ci Yes. How terribly he was annoyed by the review of 
his book in the * North American ! ' Who wrote it } " 

6 1 have not heard positively, but I presume it was 



$96 PENCILLING S BY THE WAY. 

Everett. I know nobody else in the country who holds 
-such a pen. He is the American Junius." 

" It was excessively clever, but dreadfully severe, and 
Hamilton w T as frantic about it. I sent it to him myself, 
and could scarce have done him a more ungracious office. 
But what a strange thing it is that nobody can write a good 
book on America ! The ridiculous part of it seems to me 
that men of common sense go there as travellers, and fill 
their books with scenes such as they may see every day 
«within five minutes' walk of their own doors, and call them 
American. Vulgar people are to be found all over the 
world, and I will match any scene in Hamilton or Mrs 
Trollope, any day or night, here in Edinburgh. I have al- 
ways had an idea that I should be the best traveller in 
America myself. I have been so in the habit of associating 
with people of every class in my own country, that I am 
better fitted to draw the proper distinctions, I think, be- 
tween what is universal over the world or peculiar to 
America." 

" I can promise you a hearty welcome, if you should be 
inclined to try.'* 

ei I have thought seriously of it. It is, after all, not 
more than a journey to Switzerland or Italy, of which we 
think nothing, and my vacation of rive months would give 
me ample time, I suppose, to run through the principal 
cities. I shall do it, I think." 

I asked if he had written a poem of any length within 
the last few years. 

" No, though I am always wishing to do it. Many things 
interfere with my poetry. In the first place, I am obliged 
to give a lecture once a day for six months, and in the 
summer it is such a delight to be released, and get away 
into the country with my girls and boys, that I never put 
pen to paper till I am driven. Then Blackwood is a great 
care ; and, greater objection still, I have been discouraged 
in various ways by criticism. It used to gall me to have 
my poems called imitations of Wordsworth and his school ; 
a thing I could not see myself, but which was asserted even 
by those who praised me, and which modesty forbade I 
should disavow. I really can see no resemblance between 
the Isle of Palms and any thing of Wordsworth's. I think 



WILSON AND HIS CHILDREN. 397 

I have a style of my own, and as my ain bairn, I think- 
better of it than other people, and so pride prevents my 
writing. Until late years, too, I have been the subject of 
much political abuse, and for that I should not have cared 
if it were not disagreeable to have children and servants 
reading it in the morning papers, and a fear of giving them 
another handle in my poetry was another inducement for 
not writing/' 

I expressed my surprise at what he said, for, as far as I 
knew the periodicals, Wilson had been a singularly con- 
tinued favourite. 

<l Yes, out of this immediate sphere, perhaps — but it re- 
quires a strong mind to suffer annoyance at one's lips, and 
comfort oneself with the praise of a distant and outer circle 
of public opinion. I had a family growing up, of sons and 
daughters, who felt for me more than I should have felt 
for myself, and I was annoyed perpetually. Now, these 
very papers praise me, and I really can hardly believe my 
eyes when I open them and find the same type and imprint 
expressing such different opinions. It is absurd to mind 
such weathercocks ; and, in truth, the only people worth 
heeding or writing for are the quiet readers in the country,, 
who read for pleasure, and form sober opinions apart from 
political or personal prejudice. I would give more for the 
praise of one country clergyman and his family, than I 
would for the momentary admiration of a whole city. 
People in town require a constant phantasmagoria, to keep 
up even the remembrance of your name. What books 
and authors, what battles and heroes, are forgotten in a 
day ! " 

My letter is getting too long, and I must make it shorter, 
as it is vastly less agreeable than the visit itself. Wilson 
went on to speak of his family, and his eyes kindled with 
pleasure in talking of his children. He invited me to stop 
and visit him at his place near Selkirk, in my way south*, 
and promised me that I should see Hogg, who lived not 
far off. Such inducement was scarce necessary, and I 
made a half-promise to do it, and left him, after Laving; 
passed several hours of the highest pleasure in his fascia 
ing society. 



#0S STENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

LETTER XXI. 
SCOTLAND. 

LORD J LORD B POLITICS — THE " GREY " BALL— - 

ABERDEEN— GORDOX CASTLE 

Sept. 1834. 

I was engaged to dine with Lord J on the same day 

that I had breakfasted with Wilson, and the opportunity of 
contrasting so closely these two distinguished men, both 
editors of leading Reviews, yet of different politics, and no 
less different minds, persons, and manners, was highly 
gratifying. 

At seven o'clock I drove to Moray Place, the Grosvenor 
Square of Edinburgh. I was not sorry to be early, for never 
having seen my host, I had some little advantage over the 
awkwardness of meeting a large party of strangers. After 

a few minutes' conversation with Mrs. J , the door was 

thrown quickly open, and the celebrated editor of the 
< Edinburgh/ the distinguished lawyer, the humane and 
learned judge, and the wit of the day, par excellence, 
entered with his daughter. A frank, almost merry smile ; 
a perfectly unceremonious hearty manner ; and a most play- 
ful and graceful style of saying the half- apologetic, half- 
courteous things incident to a first meeting after a letter of 
introduction, put me at once at my ease, and established a 

partiality for him, impromtu, in my feelings. J is 

rather below the middle size, slight, rapid in his speech and 
motion, never still, and glances from one subject to another 
with less abruptness and more quickness than any man I 
had ever seen. His head is small, but compact and well- 
shaped ; and the expression of his face, when serious, is 
that of quick and discriminating earnestness. His voice is 
rather thin, but pleasing ; and if I had met him inci- 
dentally, I should have described him, I think, as a most 
witty and well-bred gentleman of the School of Wilkes 
and Sheridan. Perhaps as distinguishing a mark as either 
his wit or his politeness, is an honest goodness of heart ; 



THE GREY BAIX. 3^9 

which, however it makes itself apparent, no one could 
doubt, who had been with J ten minutes. 

To my great disappointment, Mrs. J informed me 

that Lord B ■, who was their guest at the time, was 

engaged to a dinner given by the new Lord Advocate to 
Earl Grey. I had calculated much on seeing two such old 

friends and fellow- wits as J and B at the same 

table, and I could well believe what my neighbour told me 
at dinner, that it was more than a common misfortune to 
have missed it. 

"The great ic Grey dinner " had been given the day 
before, and politics were the only subject at table. It had 
been my lot to be thrown principally among Tories (Con- 
servatives is the new name) since my arrival in England, 
and it was difficult to rid myself at once of the impressions 
of a fortnight just passed in the castle of a Tory earl. My 
sympathies in the "great and glorious" occasion were 
slower than those of the company, and much of their 
enthusiasm seemed to me overstrained. Then I had not 
even dined with the two thousand Whigs under the Pavi- 
lion, and, as I was incautious enough to confess it, I was 
rallied upon having fallen into bad company, and alto- 
gether entered less into the spirit of the hour than I could 
have wished. Politics are seldom witty or amusing, and, 
though I was charmed w 7 ith the good sense and occasional 

eloquence of Lord J , I was glad to get up stairs after 

dinner to chasse-cafe and the ladies. 

We were all bound to the public ball that evening, and 
at eleven I accompanied my distinguished host to the As- 
sembly Room. Dancing was going on with great spirit 
when we entered; Lord Grey's statesman-like head was 
bowing industriously on the platform ; Lady Grey and her 
daughters sat looking on from the same elevated position, 

and Lord B — 's ugliest and shrewdest of human faces 

flitted about through the crowd, good fellow to every body, 
and followed by all eyes but those of the young. One or 
two of the Scotch nobility were there, but Whiggism is not 
popular among les hautes volailles, and the ball, though 
crowded, was but thinly sprinkled with ie porcelain. " I 
danced till three o'clock, without finding my partners better 
or worse for their politics ; and having aggravated a tempo- 



4^0 PENCILL1NGS BY THE WAY. 

riry lameness by my exertions, went home with a leg like 
an elephant to repent my abandonment of Tory quiet. 

Two or three days under the hands of the doctor, with 
the society of a Highland crone, of whose ceaseless garruli- 
ties over my poultices and plasters I could not understand 
two consecutive words, fairly finished my patience, and, 
abandoning with no little regret a charming land-route to 
die north of Scotland, I had myself taken " this side up " 
on board the steamer for Aberdeen. 

We steamed the hundred and twenty miles in twelve 
hours, paying about three dollars for our passage, I mention 
it for the curiosity of a cheap thing in this country. 

I lay at Aberdeen four days, getting out but once, and 
then for a drive to the <f Mareschal College," the alma 
mater of Dugald Dalgetty. It is a curious and rather 
picturesque old place, half in ruins, and is about being 
pulled down. A Scotch gentleman, who was a fellow- 
passenger in the steamer, and who lived in the town, called 
on me kindly twice a day, brought me books and papers, 
offered me the use of his carriage, and did every thing for 
my comfort that could have been suggested by the warmest 
friendship. Considering that it was a casual acquaintance 
of a day, it speaks well, certainly, for the " Good Sama- 
ritanism " of Scotland. 

I took two places in the coach at last, (one for my leg) 
and bowled away seventy miles across the country, with 
the delightful speed of these admirable conveyances, for 

G Castle. I arrived at Fochabers, a small town on 

the estate of the Duke of G , at three in the afternoon, 

and immediately took a post-chaise for the Castle, the gate 
of which was a stone's throw from the inn. 

The immense iron gate, surmounted by the G arms, 

the handsome and spacious stone lodges on either side, the 
canonically fat porter in white stockings and gay livery, 
lifting his hat as he swung open the massive portal, all 
bespoke the entrance to a noble residence. The road within 
was edged with velvet sward, and rolled to the smoothness 
of a terrace- walk ; the winding avenue lengthened away 
before, with trees of every variety of foliage; light carriages 
passed me driven by ladies or gentlemen bound on their 
afternoon airing ; a groom led up and down two beautiful 



G r CASTLE. 401 

blood horses, prancing along, with side-saddles and morocco 
stirrups ; and keepers with hounds and terriers, gentlemen 
on foot, idling along the walks, and servants in different 
liveries, hurrying to and fro, betokened a scene of busy 
gaiety before me. I had hardly noted these various cir- 
cumstances, before a sudden curve in the road brought the 
Castle into view, a vast stone pile with castellated wings ; 
and, in another moment, I was at the door, where a doz n 
lounging and powdered menials were waiting on a party of 
ladies and gentlemen to their severalearriages. It was the* 
moment for the afternoon drive. 



■ LETTER XXII. 
G ASTLE. 

COMPANY THERE THE PARK -DUKE OF G PERSONAL 

BEAUTY OF THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY. 

Sept. 1834. 

The last phaeton dashed away, and my chaise advanced to 
the door. A handsome boy, in a kind of page's dress, im- 
mediately came to the window, addressed me by name, and 
informed me that His Grace was out deer-shooting, but 
that my room was prepared, and he was ordered to wait on 
me. I followed him through a hall Kned with statues, 
deers* horns, and armour, and was ushered into a large 
chamber, looking out on a park, extending with its lawns 
and woods to the edge of the horizon. A more lovely view 
never feasted human eye. 

(i Who is at the Castle ? " I asked, as the boy busied 
nimself in unstrapping my portmanteau. 

" Oh, a great many, Sir." He stopped in his occupa- 
tion, and began counting on his fingers. " There's Lord 

A , and Lord C H , and the Duchess of 

E , and Lord A , and Lord S and Lady 

S , and Lord M and Lady M- , and and 

■ •- -■ ■ and twenty more, Sir." 

£ D 



• 



402 PENCILLINGS BY: THt' WAY 

" Twenty more lords and ladies ? M 

" No, Sir ! that's all the nobility." 

tc And you can't remember the names of the others ? 

" No, Sir/' 

He was a proper page. He could not trouble his.memo: 
with the names of commoners. 

" And how many sit down to dinner ? " 

K Above thirty, Sir, besides the Duke and Duchess, 

" That will do." And off tripped my slender gentleman, 
with his laced jacket, giving the fire a terrible stir-up in 
his way out, and turning back to inform me that the dinner, 
hour was seven precisely. 

It was a mild, bright afternoon, quite warm for the end 
of an English September ; and with a fire in the room, and 
a soft sunshine pouring in at the windows, a seat by the 
open casement was far from disagreeable. I passed the 
time till the sun set, looking out on the park. Hill and 
valley lay between my eye and the horizon ; sheep fed in 
picturesque flocks; and small fallow deer grazed near them; 
the trees were planted, and the distant forest shaped by the 
hand of taste -, and broad and beautiful as was the expanse 
taken in by the eye, it was evidently one princely posses- 
sion. A mile from the Castle wall, the shaven sward ex- 
tended in a carpet of velvet softness, as bright as emerald, 
studded by clumps of shrubbery, like flowers wrought 
elegantly on tapestry; and across it bounded occasionally 
a hare, and the pheasants fed undisturbed near the thickets, 
or a lady with flowing riding-dress and flaunting feather 
dashed into sight upon her fleet blood-palfrey, and was lost 
the next moment in the woods, or a boy put his pony to its 
mettle up the ascent, or a gamekeeper idled into sight with 
his gun in the hollow of his arm, and his hounds at his 
heels — and all this little world of enjoyment and luxury 
and beauty lay in the hand of one man, and was created by 
his wealth in these northern wilds of Scotland, a day's 
journey almost from the possession of another human being! 
I never realized so forcibly the splendid results of wealth 
and primogeniture. 

The sun set in a blaze of fire among the pointed firs 
crowning the hills, and by the occasional prance of a horse's 
feet on the gravel, and the roll of rapid wheels and now 



DINING-ltOOM. 403 

and then a gay laugh and merry voices, the different parties 
were returning to the Castle. Soon after, a loud gong 
sounded through the gallery, the signal to dress, and 1 left 
my musing occupation unwillingly, to make my toilet for 
an appearance in a formidable circle of titled aristocrats, 
not one of whom I had ever seen, the Duke himself a 
stranger to me, except through the kind letter of invitation 
lying upon the table. 

I was sitting by the fire, imagining forms and faces for 
the different persons who had been named to me, when 
there was a knock at the door, and a tall, white-haired 
gentleman, of noble physiognomy, but singularly cordial 
address, entered, with a broad red riband across his breast, 
and welcomed me most heartily to the Castle. The gong 
sounded at the next moment, and, in our way down, he 
named over his oth>?r guests, and prepared me in a measure 
for the introductions which followed. The drawing-room 
was crowded like a soiree. The Duchess, a tall and very 
handsome woman, with a smile of the most winning sweet- 
ness, received me at the door, and I was presented succes* 
sively to every person present. Dinner was announced 
immediately, and the difficult question of precedence being 1 
sooner settled than I had ever seen it before in so large a 
party, we passed through files of servants to the dining- 
room. 

It was a large and very lofty hall, supported at the ends 
by marble columns, within which was stationed a band of 
music, playing delightfully. The walls were lined with 
full-length family pictures, from old knights in armour, to 

the modern dukes in kilt of the G plaid ; and on the 

sideboards stood services of gold plate, the most gorgeously 
massive, and the most beautiful in workmanship I had ever 
seen. There were among the vases, several large coursing* 
cups, won by the Duke's hounds, of exquisite shape and 
ornament. 

I fell into my place between a gentleman and a very 
beautiful woman, of perhaps twenty- two, neither of whose 
names I remembered, though I had but just been intro- 
duced. The Duke probably anticipated as much, and as I 
took my seat he called out to me, from the top of the table, 

that I had, upon my right, Lady -, " the most agree* 

2 d 2 



404 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

able woman in Scotland." It was unnecessary to say that 
she was the most lovely. 

I have been struck everywhere in England with the 
beauty of the higher classes, and as I looked around me 
upon the aristocratic company at the table, I thought I 
never had seen " Heaven's image double- stamped as man, 
and noble," so unequivocally clear. There were two young 
men and four or five young ladies of rank — and five or six 
people of more decided personal attractions could scarcely 
be found ; the style of form and face at the same time being 
of that cast of superiority which goes by the expressive 
name of (i thorough-bred." There is a striking difference 
in this respect between England and the countries of the 
Continent — the pay sans of France, and the contadini of 
Italy, being physically far superior to their degenerate 
masters; while the gentry and nobility of England differ 
from the peasantry in limb and feature, as the racer differs 
from the dray-horse, or the greyhound from the cur. The 
contrast between the manners of English and French gen- 
tlemen is quite as striking. The empressment, the warmth, 
the shrug and gesture of the Parisian ; and the working 
eye-brow, dilating or contracting eye, and conspirator-like 
action of the Italian, in the most common conversation, are 
the antipodes of English high breeding. I should say a 
North American Indian, in his more dignified phase, ap- 
proached nearer to the manner of an English nobleman 
than any other person. The calm repose of person and 
feature, the self possession under all circumstances, that 
Incapability of surprise or dereglement, and that decision 
about the slightest circumstance, and the apparent certainty 
that he is acting absolutely commc il faut, is equally "gen- 
tlemanlike " and Indianlike. You cannot astonish an 
English gentleman. If a man goes into a fit at his side, 
or a servant drops a dish upon his shoulder, or he hears that 
the house is on fire, he sets down his wine-glass with the 
some deliberation. He has made up his mind what to do 
in all possible cases, and he does it. He is cold at a first 
introduction, and may bow stiffly (which he always does) 
in drinking wine with you, but it is his manner ; and he 
would think an Englishman out of his senses, who should 
now down to his very plate, and smile, as a Frenchman 



BREAKFAST. 405 

does on a similar occasion. Rather chilled by this, you are 
a little astonished when the ladies have left the table, and 
lie closes his chair up to you, to receive an invitation to 
pass a month with him at his country-house ; and to di&» 
cover, that at the very moment he bowed so coldly, he was 
thinking how he should contrive to facilitate your plans for 
getting to him, or seeing the country to advantage on the 
way. 

The band ceased playing when the ladies left the table ; 
the gentlemen closed up, conversation assumed a merrier 
cast, coffee and liqueurs were brought in, when the wines 
began to be circulated more slow T ly ; and at eleven, there 
was a general move to the drawing room. Cards, tea, and 
music, filled up the time till twelve, and then the ladies took 
their departure, and the gentlemen sat down to supper. 
I got to bed somewhere about two o'clock ; and thus ended 
an evening, which I had anticipated as stiff and embarras- 
sing, but which is marked in my tablets as one of the most 
social and kindly I have had the good fortune to record on 
my travels. 



LETTER XXIII 
G CASTLE. 



ENGLISH BREAKFASTS SALMOX-FISHERY LORD A MR. 

M<LANE — SPORTING ESTABLISHMENT OF G CASTLE. 

Sept. 1854. 

I akose late on the first morning after my arrival at G 

Castle, and found the large party already assembled about 
the breakfast -table. I was struck on entering with the 
different air of the room. The deep windows, opening out 
upon the park, had the effect of sombre landscapes in oaken 
frames ; the troops of liveried servants, the glitter of plate, 
the music, that had contributed to the splendour of the 
scene the night before, were gone ; the Duke sat laughing 
at the head of the table, with a newspaper in his hand. 



406 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

dressed in a coarse shooting-jacket and coloured cravat , 
the Duchess was in a plain morning dress and cap of the 
simplest character ; and the high-horn women about the 
table, whom I had left glittering with jewel and dressed in 
all the attractions of fashion, appeared with the simplest 
coiffure and a toilet of studied plainness. The ten or twelve 
noblemen present were engrossed with their letters or news- 
papers over tea and toast ; and in them, perhaps, the trans- 
formation was still greater. The soigne man of fashion of 
the night before, faultless in costume and distinguished in 
his appearance — in the full force of the term — was enveloped 
now in a coat of fustian, with a coarse waistcoat of plaid, 
a gingham cravat, and hob- nailed shoes, (for shooting) and 
in place of the gay hilarity of the supper-table, wore a face 
of calm indifference, and ate his breakfast and read the 
paper in a rarely broken silence. I wondered, as I looked 
about me, what would be the impression of many people 
in my own country, could they look in upon that plain 
party, aware that it was composed of the proudest nobility 
and the highest fashion of England. 

Breakfast in England is a confidential and unceremonious 
hour, and servants are generally dispensed with. This is 
to me, I confess, an advantage it has over every other meal. 
I detest eating with tw r enty tall fellows standing opposite, 
whose business it is to watch me. The coffee and tea were 
on the table, with toast, muffins, oat-cakes, marmalade, 
jellies, fish, and all the paraphernalia of a Scotch breakfast; 
and on the sideboard stood cold meats for those who liked 
them, and they were expected to go to it and help them- 
selves. Nothing could be more easy, unceremonious, and 
affable than the whole tone of the meal. One after another 
rose and fell into groups in the windows, or walked up and 
down the long room, and, with one or two others, I joined 
the Duke at the head of the table, who gave us some in- 
teresting particulars of the salmon fisheries of the Spey. 
The privilege of fishing the river within his lands is bought 
of him at the pretty sum of eight thousand pounds a-year ! 
A salmon was brought in for me to see, as of remarkable 
size, which was not more than half the weight of our com- 
mon American salmon. 

The ladies went off unaccompanied to their walks in the 



LoftD A' 407 

park and other avocations: those bound for the covers joined 
the gamekeepers, who were waiting with their dogs in the 
leash at the stables ; some paired off to the billiard-room, 

and J was left with Lord A in the breakfast-room 

alone The Tory ex-minister made a thousand inquiries, 
with great apparent interest, about America. When Secre^ 
tarv for Foreign Affairs in the Wellington Cabinet, he had 
known Mr. M'Lane intimately. He said he seldom had 
been so impressed with a man's honesty and straightfor- 
wardness, and never did public business with any one with 
more pleasure. He admired Mr. M'Lane, and hoped to 
enjoy his friendship. He wished he might return as our 
Minister to England. One such honourable, uncompro- 
mising man, he said, was worth a score of practised diplo- 
matists. He spoke of Gallatin and Rush in the same 
flattering manner, but recurred continually to Mr. M'Lane, 
of whom he could scarce say enough. His politics would 
naturally lead him to approve of the administration of 
General Jackson, but he seemed to admire the President 
very much as a man. 

Lord A has the name of being the proudest and 

coldest aristocrat of England. It is amusing to see the 
person who tears such a character. He is of the middle 
height, rather clumsily made, with an address more of sober 
dignity than of pride or reserve. With a black coat much 
worn, and always too large for him ; a pair of coarse check 
trowsers very ill made 5 a waistcoat buttoned up to the 
throat, and a cravat of the most primitive negUge, his 
aristocracy is certainly not in his dress. His manners are of 
absolute simplicity, amounting almost to want of style. 
He crosses his hands behind him and balances on his heels; 
in conversation his voice is low and cold, and .he seldom 
smiles. Yet there is a certain benignity in his countenance, 
aad an indefinable superiority and high breeding in his 
simple address, that would betray his rank after a few 
minutes' conversation to any shrewd observer. It is only 
in his manner toward the ladies of the party that he would 
be immediately distinguishable from men of lower rank in 
society. 

Still suffering from lameness, I declined all invitations to 
the shooting parties, who started across the park, with the 



408 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

dogs leaping about them in a phrenzy of delight, and ac- 
cepted the Duchess's kind offer of a pony phaeton to drive 
down to the kennels. The Duke's breed, both of setters 
and hounds, is celebrated throughout the kingdom. They 
occupy a spacious building in the centre of a wood, a quad- 
rangle inclosing a court, and large enough for a respectable 
poor-house. The chief huntsman and his family, and 
perhaps a gamekeeper or two, lodge on the premises, and 
the dogs are divided by palings across the court. I was 
rather startled to be introduced into the small enclosure 
with a dozen gigantic blood-hounds, as high as my breast, 
the keeper's whip in my hand the only defence. I was not 
easier for the man's assertion that, without it, they would 
"hae the life oot o' me in a crack/' They came around 
me very quietly, and one immense fellow, with a chest like 
ahorse, and ahead of the finest expression, stood up and 
laid his paws on my shoulders, with the deliberation of a 
friend about to favour me with some grave advice. One 
can scarce believe these noble creatures have not reason like 
ourselves. Those slender, thorough- bred heads, — large, 
speaking eyes, and beautiful limbs and graceful action, 
should be gifted with more than mere animal instinct. The 
greyhounds were the beauties of the kennel, however. I 
never had seen such perfect creatures. " Dinna tak' pains 
to caress 'em, Sir," said the huntsman, " they *!1 only be 
h an git for it!" I asked for an explanation, and the man 
^rith an air as if I was uncommonly ignorant, told me that 
si hound was hung the moment he betrayed attachment to 
any one, or in any way showed signs of superior sagacity. 
It is an object, of course to preserve them, what they 
usually are, the greatest fools as well as the handsomest of 
the canine species, and on the first sign of attachment to 
their master, their death-warrant is signed. They are tco 
sensible to live ! The Duchess told me afterward that sh* 
had the greatest difficulty in saving the life of the finest 
hound in the pack, who had committed the sin of showing 
pleasure once or twice when she appeared. 

The setters were in the next division, and really they 
were quite lovely. The rare tan and black dog of this race, 
with his silky, floss hair, intelligent muzzle, good-humoured 
face, and carressing fondness, (luckv dog ! that affection is 



THE PARK. 409 

permitted in his family!) quite excited my admiration. 
There were thirty or forty of these, old and young ; and a 
friend of the Duke's would as soon ask him for a church 
living as for the present of one of them. The former would 
be by much the smaller favour. Then there were terriers 
of four or five breeds, of one family of which (long-haired, 
long-bodied, short- legged, and perfectly white little 
wretches) the keeper seemed particlarly proud. I evidently 
sunk in his opinion for not admiring them. 

I passed the remainder of the morning in threading the 
lovely alleys and avenues of the park, miles after miles of 
gravel- walk extending away in every direction, with every 
variety of turn and shade, now a deep wood, now a sunny 
opening upon a glade, here along the bank of a stream, and 
there around the borders of a small lagoon, the little ponies 
flying on over the smoothly -rolled paths, and tossing their 
mimicking heads as if they too enjoyed the beauty of the 
princely domain. This, I thought to myself, as I sped on 
through light and shadow, is very like what is called hap- 
piness ; and this (if to be a Duke were to enjoy it as I do 
with this fresh feeling of novelty and delight) is a condition 
of life it is not quite irrational to envy. And giving my 
little steeds the rein, I repeated to myself Scott's graphic 

description, which seems written for the park of G 

Castle, and thanked heaven for one more day of unalloyed 
happiness, 

•' And there soft swept in velvet green, 
The plain with many a glade between, 
Whose tangled alleys far invade 
The depths of the brown forest shade ; 
And the tall fern obscured the lawn, 
Fair shelter fsr the sportive fawn. 
There tufted close with copse-wood green, 
W T as many a swelling h'llock seen, 
And all around was verdure meet 
For pressure of the fairies' feet. 
The glossy valley loved the park, 
The yew-tree lent its shadows dark, 
And many an old oak worn and bare 
With all its shiver*d boughs was there.* 



410 PENCILLTNGS BY THE WAY. 



LETTER XXIV. 

G CASTLE. 

* 

SCOTCH HOSPITALITY — DUCHESS' INFANT SCHOOL — MANNERS OP 
niGH LIFE— THE TONE OF CONVERSATION IN ENGLAND AND 
AMERICA CONTRASTED. 

Sept. 1834. 

The aim of Scotch hospitality seems to be, to convince you 
that the house and all that is in it is your own, and you 
are at liberty to enjoy it as if you were, in the French sense 

of the French phrase, ckez voas. The routine of G i 

Caslle was what each one chose to make it. Between 
breakfast and lunch the ladies were generally invisible, and 
the gentlemen rode or shot, or played billiards, or kept 
their rooms. At two o'clock, a dish or two of hot game 
and a profusion of cold meats were set on the small tables 
in the dining-room, and everybody came in for a kind of 
lounging half-meal, which occupied perhaps an hour. 
Thence all adjourned to the drawing-room, under the 
windows of which were drawn up carriages of all descrip- 
tions, with grooms, out-riders, footmen, and saddle-horses 
for gentlemen and ladies. Parties were then made up for 
driving or riding, and from a pony-chaise to a phaeton-and- 
four, there was no class of vehicle which was not at your 
disposal. In ten minutes the carriages were usually all 
filled, and away they flew, some to the banks of the Spey 
or the sea-side — some to the drives in the park, and with 
the delightful consciousness that, speed where you would, 
the horizon scarce limited the possession of your host, and 
you were every where at home. The ornamental gates 
flying open at your approach, miles distant from the castle ; 
the herds of red deer trooping away from the sound of 
wheels in the silent park ; the stately pheasants feeding 
tamely in the immense preserves 5 the hares scarce troubling 
themselves to get out of the length of the whip ; the stalk- 
ing gamekeepers lifting their hats in the dark recesses of the 
forest — there was something in this perpetual reminding of 
your privileges, which, as a novelty, was far from disagree- 



able. 1 



INFANT SCHOOL. -ill 



)le. I could not at the time bring myself to feel, what 
perhaps would be more poetical and republican, that a ride 
in the wild and unfenced forest of my own country would 
have been more to my taste. 

The second afternoon of my arrival, I tools a seat in the 

carriage with Lord A — , and we followed the Duchess, 

who drove herself in a pony-chaise, to visit a school on the 
estate. Attached to a small Gothic chapel, a few minutes' 
drive from the Castle, stood a building in the same style, 
appropriated to the instruction of the children of the Duke's 
tenantry. There were a hundred and thirty little creatures, 
from two years to five or six, and, like all infant-schools in 
these days of improved education, it was an interesting and 
affecting sight. The ]ast one I had been in was at Athens; 
and though I missed here the dark eyes and Grecian faces 
of the iEgean, I saw health and beauty of a kind which 
stirred up more images of home, and promised, perhaps, 
more for the future. They went through their evolutions, 
and answered their questions with an intelligence and 
cheerfulness that were quite delightful ; and I was sorry to 
leave them, even for a drive in the loveliest sunset of a 
lingering day of summer. 

People in Europe are more curious about the comparison 
of the natural productions of America with those of Eng- 
land, than about our social and political differences. A man 
who does not care to know whether the President has 
destroyed the bank, or the bank the President, or whether 
Mrs. Trollope has flattered the Americans or not, will be 
very much interested to know if the pine-tree in his park is 
comparable to the same tree in America, if the same cattle 
are found there, or the woods stocked with the same game 
as his own. I think there is nothing on which I have been 
so often questioned. The Duchess led the way to a planta- 
tion of American trees, at some distance from the Castle, 
and, stopping beneath some really noble firs, I was asked if 
our forest- trees were often larger. They were shrubs, 
however, to the gigantic productions of the West. What- 
ever else we may see abroad, we must return home to find 
the magnificence of nature. 

The number at the dinner-table of G Castle was 

seldom less than thirty, but the company was continually 



412 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY, 

varied by departures and arrivals. No sensation was made 
"by either one or the other. A travelling-carriage dashed 
up to the door, was disburdened of its load, and drove 
round to the stables, and the question was seldom asked, 
" Who is arrived ? " You are sure to see at dinner — and 
an addition of half a dozen to the party made no percepti- 
ble difference in any thing. Leave-takings were managed 
in the same quiet way. Adieus were made to the Duke 
and Duchess, and to no one else except he happened to 
encounter the parting guest upon the staircase, or were 
more than a common acquaintance. In short, in every way 
the gene of life seemed weeded out, and if unhappiness or 
ennui found its way into the Castle, it was introduced in 
the sufferer's own bosom. For me, I gave myself up to 
enjoyment with an abandon I could not resist. With kind, 
ness and courtesy in every look, the luxuries and comforts 
of a regal establishment at my freest disposal ; solitude 
when I pleased, company when I pleased, — the whole 
visible horizon fenced in for the enjoyment of a household, 
of which I was a temporary portion, and no enemy except 
time and the gout, I felt as if I had been spirited into some 
castle of felicity, and had not come by the roval mail-coach 
at all. 

The great spell of high life in this country seems to be 
repose. All violent sensations are avoided, as out of taste, 
In conversation, nothing is so " odd " (a word, by the way, 
that in England means everything disagreeable) as empha- 
sis or startling epithet, or gesture, and in common inter- 
course nothing so vulgar as any approach to " a scene." 
The high-bred Englishman studies to express himself in 
the plainest words that will convey his meaning, and is 
just as simple and calm in describing the death of his friend, 
and just as technical, so to speak, as in discussing the wea- 
ther. For all extraordinary admiration the word " capital H 
suffices; for all ordinary praise the word " nice;" for all 
condemnation in morals, manners, or religion, the word 
"odd." To express yourself out of this simple vocabulary 
is to raise the eyebrows of the whole company at once, and 
stamp yourself under-bred or a foreigner. 

This sounds ridiculous, but it is the exponent not only of 
good breeding, but of the true philosophy of social life. 



I 



AMERICAN PHRASEOLOGY, 413 



The general happiness of a party consists in giving every 
individual an equal chance, and in wounding no one's self- 
love. What is called an " overpowering person/' is imme- 
diately shunned, for he talks too much, and excites too 
much attention. In any other country he would be called 
" amusing." He is considered here as a monopolizer of the 
general interest, and his laurels, talk he never so well, 
shadow the rest of the company. You meet your most 
intimate friend in society after a long separation, and he 
gives you his hand as if you had parted at breakfast. If he 
had expressed all he felt, it would have been u a scene "" 
and the repose of the company would have been disturbed. 
You invite a clever man to dine with you, and he enriches 
his descriptions with new epithets and original w T ords. He 
is offensive. He eclipses the language of your other guests, 
and is out of keeping with the received and subdued tone 
to which the most common intellect rises with ease. So- 
ciety on this footing is delightful to all, and the diffident 
man, or the dull man, or the quiet man, enjoys it as much 
as another. For violent sensations you must go elsewhere. 
Your escape-valve is not at your neighbour's ear. 

There is a great advantage in this in another respect. 
Your tongue never gets you into mischief. The " unsafe- 
ness of Americans " in society (I quote a phrase I have heard 
used a thousand times) arises wholly from the American 
habit of applying high-wrought language to trifles. I can 
tell one of my countrymen abroad by his first remark. Ten 
to one his first sentence contains a superlative that would 
make an Englishman imagine he had lost his senses. The 
natural consequence is — continual misapprehension, offence 
is given where none was intended, words that have no 
meaning are the ground of quarrels, and gentlemen are shy 
of us. A good-natured young nobleman, whom I sat next 

at dinner on my first arrival at G Castle, told me 

he was hunting with Lord A , when two very gentle- 
manlike young men rode up and requested leave to follow 
the hounds, but in such extraordinary language, that they 
were not at first understood. The hunt continued for s me 
days, and at last the strangers, who rode well and were seen 
continually, were invited to dine with the principal noble- 
men of the neighbourhood. They turned out to be Arae- 



414 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

ricans, and were every way well-bred and agreeable, but 
their extraordinary mode of expressing themselves kept the 
company in continual astonishment. They were treated 
with politeness, of course, while they remained, but no 
little fun was made of their phraseology after their depar- 
ture ; and the impression on the mind of my informant 
was very much against the purity of the English language 
as spoken by Americans. I mention it for the benefit of 
those whom it mav concern. 



LETTER XXV. 
THE HIGHLANDS. 

DEPARTURE FROM G CASTLE THE PRETENDER SCOTCH 

CHARACTER MISAPPREHENDED — OBSERVANCE OF SUNDAY- 
HIGHLAND CHIEFTAINS. 

Sept. 1834. 

Ten days had gone by like the u Days of Thalaba," and I 

took my leave of G • Castle. It seemed to me, as I 

looked back upon it, as if I had passed a separate life there 
— so beautiful had been every object on which I had looked 
in that time, and so free from every mixture of ennvi had 
been the hours from the first to the last. I have set them 
apart in my memory, those ten days, as a bright ellipse in 
the usual procession of joys and sorrows. It is a little world, 
walled in from rudeness and vexation, in which I have 
lived a life. 

I took the coach for Elgin, and visited the fine old ruins 
of the cathedral, and then kept on to Inverness, passing over 
the <c Blasted Heath," the tryst of Macbeth and the witches. 
We passed within sight of Culloden Moor at sunset, and 
the driver pointed out to me a lonely castle where the 
Pretender slept the night before the battle. The interest 
with which I had read the romantic history of Prince 
Charlie in my boyhood, was fully awakened, for his name 
is still a watchword of aristocracy in Scotland ; and the 
Jacobite songs, with their half-warlike, half-melancholy 



INVERNESS. 415 

music, were favourites of the Duchess of G , who 

sung them in their original Scotch, with an enthusiasm 
and sweetness that stirred my blood like the sound of a 
trumpet. There certainly never was a cause so indebted to 
music and poetry as that which was lost at Culloden. 

The hotel at Inverness was crowded with livery- servants, 
and the door inaccessible for carriages. I had arrived on 
the last day of a county meeting, and all the chieftains and 
lairds of the north and west of Scotland were together. The 
last ball was to be given that evening, and I was strongly 
tempted to go by four or five acquaintances whom I found 
in the hotel, but the gout was peremptory My shoe would 
not go on, and I went to bed. 

I was limping about in the morning with a kind old 

baronet, whom I had met at G Castle, when I was 

warmly accosted by a gentleman whom I did not imme- 
diately remember. On his reminding me that we had 
parted last on Lake Leman, however, I recollected a gentle^ 
manlike Scotchman, who had offered me his glass opposite 
Copet to look at the house of Madame de Stael, and whom 
I had left afterward at Lausanne, without even knowing 
his name. He invited me immediately to dine, and ia 
about an hour or two after called in his carriage, and drove 
me to a charming country-house, a few miles down the 
shore of Loch Ness, where he presented me to his family, 
and treated me in every respect as if I had been the oldest 
of his friends. I mention the circumstance for the sake 
of a comment on what seems to me a universal error with 
regard to the Scotch character. Instead of a calculating 
and cold people, as they are always described by the English, 
they seem to me more a nation of impulse and warm feeling 
than any other I have seen. Their history certainly goes 
to prove a most chivalrous character in days gone by, and 
as far as I know Scotchmen, they preserve it still with even 
less of the modification of the times than other nations. 
The instance I have mentioned above is one of many that 
have come under my own observation, and in many inqui- 
ries since, i have never found an Englishman, who had been 
in Scotland, who did not confirm my impression. I have 
not traded with them, it is true, and I have seen only the 
wealthier class; but still I think my judgment a fail one. 



416 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

The Scotch in England are, in a manner, what the Yan- 
kees are in the southern states, and their advantages ox su- 
perior quickness and education have given them a success 
which is ascribed to meaner causes. I think (common pre- 
judice contra dicente) that neither the Scotch nor the Eng- 
lish are a cold or an unfriendly people, but the Scotch 
certainly the farther removed from coldness of the two. 

Inverness is the only place I have ever been in where no 
medicine could be procured on a Sunday. I did not want, 
indeed, for other mementos of the sacredness of the day. In 
the crowd of the public room of the hotel half the persons, 
at least, had either bible or prayer-book, and there was a 
hush through the house, and a gravity in the faces of the 
people passing in the street, that reminded me more of New 
England than anything I have seen. I had wanted some 
linen washed on Saturday. " Impossible ! " said the waiter, 
"no one does up linen on Sunday." Toward evening I 
wished for a carriage to drive over to my hospitable friend. 
Mine host stared, and I found it was indecorous to drive 
out on Sunday. I must add, however, that the apothe- 
cary's shop was opened after the second service, and that I 
was allowed a carriage on pleading my lameness. 

Inverness is a romantic-looking town, charmingly situ- 
ated between Loch Ness and the Moray Firth, with the 
bright river Ness running through it, parallel to its prin- 
cipal street, and the most picturesque eminences in its 
neighbourhood. There is a very singular elevation on the 
other side of the Ness, shaped like a ship, keel up, and 
rising from the centre of the plain, covered with beautiful 
trees. It is called, in Gaelic, Tonnaheurick, or the Hill of 
the Fairies. 

It has been in one respect like getting abroad again, to 
come to Scotland. Nothing seemed more odd to me on my 
first arrival in England, than having suddenly ceased to be 
a " foreigner." I was as little at home myself, as in France 
or Turkey, (much less than in Italy) yet there was that in 
the manner of every person who approached me which con- 
veyed the presumption that I was as familiar with every - 
thing about me as himself. In Scotland, however, the 
Englishman is the (( Sassenach," and a stranger ; and, as 1 
w r as always taken for one, I found mvself once more invested 






DISTINCTIONS. 417 

with that agreeable consequence which accompanies it, my 
supposed prejudices consulted, my opinion about another 
country asked, and comparisons referred to me as an ex-parte 
judge. I found here, as abroad too, that the Englishman 
was expected to pay more for trifling services than a native, 
and that he would be much more difficult about his accom- 
modations, and more particular in his chance company. I 
was amused at the hotel with an instance of the want of 
honour shown " the prophet in his own country." I went 
down to the coffee-room for my breakfast about noon, and 
found a remarkably fashionable, pale, u Werter-like " man, 
excessively dressed, feut with all the air of a gentleman, 
sitting with the newspaper on one side of the fire. He 
offered me the papur after a few minutes, but with the cold, 
half-supercilious politeness which marks the dandy tribe, 
and strolled off to the window. The landlord entered pre- 
sently, and asked me if I had any objection to breakfasting 
with that gentleman, as it would be a convenience in serv- 
ing it up. " None in the world," I said, " but you had 
better ask the other gentleman first." u Hoot ! " said Boni- 
face, throwing up his chin with an incredulous expression, 
" its honour for the like o' him ! He's joost a laddie born 
and brought up i' the toon. I kenn'd him weel." And so 
enter breakfast for two. I found my companion a well- 
bred man ; rather surprised, however, if not vexed, to dis- 
cover that I knew he was of Inverness. He had been in 
the civil service of the East India Company for some years, 
(hence his paleness) and had returned to Scotland for his 
health. He was not the least aware that he was known, 
apparently, and he certainly had not the slightest trace of 
his Scotch birth. The landlord told me afterward that his 
parents were poor, and he had raised himself by his own 
cleverness alone, and yet it was €i honour for the like o' 
him/' to sit at table with a common stranger ! The world 
is really very much the same all over. 

In the three days 1 passed at Inverness, I made the ac- 
quaintance of several of the warm-hearted Highland chiefs, 
and found great difficulty in refusing to go home with 
them. 

There was a peculiar style about all these young men 
something very like the manner of our high-bred Virginians 

2 s 



418 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY 






*— a free, gallant, self-possessed bearing, fiery and prompt, 
vet full of courtesy. I was pleased with them altogether. 

I had formed an agreeable acquaintance, on my passage 
from London to Edinburgh in the steamer, with a gentle- 
man bound to the Highlands for the shooting season. He 

was engaged to pay a visit to Lord L , with whom I 

had myself promised to pass a week, and we parted at Edin- 
burgh in the hope of meeting again. On my return from 
Dalhousie, a fortnight after, we met by chance at the hotel 
in Edinburgh, he having arrived the same day, and having 
taken a passage, like myself, for Aberdeen. We made 
another agreeable passage together, and he left me at the 

gate of G Castle, proceeding north on another visit. I 

was sitting in the coffee-room at Inverness, when, enter 
again my friend, to my great surprise, who informed me 
that Lord L — had returned to England. Disap- 
pointed alike of our visit, we took a passage together once 
more in the steamer from Inverness to Fort William for 
the following morning. It was a singular train of coinci- 
dences, but I was indebted to it for one of the most agree- 
able chance acquaintances I have yet made. 



LETTER XXVI. 
THE HIGHLANDS. 

CALEDONIAN CANAL DOGS — ENGLISH EXCLUSIVENESS — ENGLISH 

INSENSIBILITY OF FINE SCENERY FLORA MACDONALD AND* 

THE PRETENDER — HIGHLAND TRAVELLING. 

Sept. 1834. 

We embarked early in the morning in the steamer which 
goes across Scotland from sea to sea, by the half-natural, 
half-artificial passage of the Caledonian canal. One long 
glen, as the reader knows, extends quite through this moun- 
tainous country, and in its bosom lies a chain of the love- 
liest lakes, whose extremities so nearly meet, that it seems 
as if a blow of a spade should have run them together. 
Their different elevations, however, made it an expensive 



LOCH NESS* 4I9 

work in locks, and the canals altogether cost ten times the 
original calculation. 

I went on board with my London friend, who, from our 
meeting so frequently, had now become my established 
companion. The boat was crowded, yet more with dogs 
than men; for every one, I think, had his brace of terriers 
or his pointers, and every lady her hound or poodle, and 
they were chained to every leg of a sofa, chair, portmanteau, 
and fixture in the vessel. It was like a floating kennel, and 
the passengers were fully occupied in keeping the peace be- 
tween their own dog and their neighbours. The same 
thing would have been a much greater annoyance in any 
other country ; but in Scotland the dogs are all of beau- 
tiful and thorough-bred races, and it is a pleasure to see 
them. Half as many French pugs would have been insuf- 
ferable. 

We opened into Loch Ness immediately, and the scenery 
was superb. The waters were like a mirror ; and the hills 
draped in mist, and rising one or two thousand feet directly 
from the shore, and nothing to break the wildness of the 
crags but the ruins of the constantly-occurring castles, 
perched like eyries upon their summits. You might have 
had the same natural scenery in America, but the ruins ancf 
the thousand associations would have been wanting ; and 
it is this, much more than the mere beauty of hill or lake, 
which makes the pleasure of travel. We ran close in to a 
green cleft in the mountains on the southern shore, in which 
stands one of the few old castles, still inhabited by the chief 
of his clan — that of Fraser of Lovat, so well known in 
Scottish story. Our object was to visit the Fall of Foyers, 
in sight of which it stands, and the boat came- to off the 
point, and gave us an hour for the excursion. It was a 
pretty stroll up through the woods, and we found a cascade 
very like the Turttman in Switzerland, but with no remark- 
able feature which would make it interesting in description. 

I was amused after breakfast with what has always struck 
me on board English steamers — the gradual division of the 
company into parties of congenial rank or consequence. 
Not for conversation — for fellow-travellers of a day seldom 
become acquainted — but, as if it was a process of crystalliza- 
tion, the well-bred and the half-bred and the vulgar, each 

2 e 2 



420 PENCILUJ^GS BY THE WAY. 

separating to his natural neighbour, apparently from a mere 
fitness of propinquity. This takes place sometimes, but 
rarely and in a much less degree, on board an American 
steamer. There are, of course, in England, as with us, those 
who are presuming and impertinent, but an instance of it 
has seldom fallen under my observation. The English seem 
to have an instinct of each other's position in life. A gen- 
tleman enters a crowd, looks about him, makes up his mind 
at once from whom an advance of civility would be agree- 
able or the contrary, gets near the best set without seeming 
to notice them, and if any chance accident brings on conver- 
sation with his neighbours, you may be certain he is sure 
of his man. 

We had about a hundred persons on board, and I could 
see no one who seemed to notice or enjoy the lovely scenery 
we were passing through. I made the remark to my com- 
panion, who was an old stager in London fashion ; fifty, but 
still a beau, and he was compelled to allow it, though piqued 
for the taste of his countrymen. A baronet with his wife 
and sister sat in the corner opposite us, and one lady slept 
on the other's shoulder, and neither saw a feature of the 
scenery except by an accidental glance in changing her posi- 
tion. Yet it was more beautiful than most things I have 
seen that are celebrated, and the ladies, as my friend said, 
looked like" nice persons." 

I had taken up a book while we were passing the locks 
at the junction of Loch Ness and Loch Oich, and was read- 
ing aloud to my friend the interesting description of Flora 
Macdonald's heroic devotion to Prince Charles Edward. A 
very lady-like girl, who sat next me, turned around as I laid 
down the book, and informed me, with a look of pleased 
pnae, that the heroine was her grandmother. She was 
returning from the first visit she had ever made to the Isle, 
( I think of Skye) of which the Maedonalds were the here- 
ditary lords, and in which the fugitive prince was concealed. 
Her brother, an officer, just returned from India, had ac- 
companied her on her pilgrimage, and as he sat on the other- 
side of his sister he joined in the conversation, and entered 
into the details of Flora's history with great enthusiasm. 
The book belonged to the boat, and my friend had brought 
it from below. The coincidence was certainly singular. 



A HIGHLAND CART. 421 

We had decided to leave the steamer at Fort William, 
and cross through the heart of Scotland to Loch Lomond. 
My companion was very fond of London hours, and slept 
late, knowing that the cart— the only conveyance to be had 
in that country — would wait our time. I was lounging 
about the inn, and amusing myself with listening to the 
Gaelic spoken by every body who belonged to the place, 
when the pleasant family with whom we had past the 
evening, drove out of the yard, (having brought their horsed 
down in the boat) intending to proceed by land to Glasgow- 
We renewed our adieus, on my part, with the sincerest 
regret, and I strolled down the road and watched them till 
they were out of sight, feeling that (selfish world as it is) 
there are some things that look at least like impulse and 
kindness— so like, that I can make out of them a very pass- 
able happiness. 

We mounted our cart at eleven o'clock, and with a bright 
sun ; a clear, vital air ; a handsome and good-humoured 
callant for a driver, and the most renov/ned of Scottish 
scenery before us, the day looked very auspicious. I could 
not help smiling at the appearance of my fashionable friend, 
sitting with his well-poised hat and nicely adjusted curls, 
upon the springless cross-board of a most undisguised and 
unscrupulous market-cart, yet in the highest good-humour 
with himself and the world. The boy sat on the shafts, 
and talked Gaelic to his horse ; the mountains and the lake, 
spread out before us, looked as if human eye had never pro- 
faned their solitary beauty, and I enjoyed it ail the more, 
perhaps, that our conversation was of London and its de- 
lights ; and the racy scandal of the distinguished people of 
that great Babel amused me in the midst of that which is 
most unlike it — pure and lovely nature. Everything is 
seen so much better by contrast ! 

We crossed the head of Loch Linnhe, and kept down its 
eastern bank, skirting the water by a winding road directly 
under the wall of the mountains. We were to dine at 
Bally hulish, and just before reaching it we passed the open- 
ing of a glen on the opposite side of the lake, in which lay, 
in a green paradise shut in by the loftiest rocks, one of the 
most enviable habitations I have ever seen. I found on 
inquiry that it was the house of a Highland chief, to whom 



422 PENCILLIM'GS BT TEE WAY 

Lord D had kindly given me a letter, but my lameviess 

and the presence of my companion induced me to abandon 
the visit ; and, hailing a fishing boat, I despatched my letters, 
which were sealed, across the loch, and we kept on to the 
inn. We dined here ; and I just mention, for the inform- 
ation of scenery hunters, that the mountain opposite Bally- 
jfiulish sweeps down to the lake with a curve which is even 
more exquisitely graceful than that of Vesuvius in its far- 
famed descent to Portici. That same inn of Ballyhulish, 
by the way, stands in the midst of a scene, altogether, that 
does not pass easily from the memory — a lonely and sweet 
spot that would recur to one in a moment of violent love or 
hate, when the heart shrinks from the intercourse and ob- 
servation of men. 

We found the travellers' book, at the inn, full of records 
of admiration, expressed in all degrees of doggerej. People 
on the road write very bad poetry. I found the names of 
Dne or two Americans, whom I knew, and it was a pleasure 
to feel that my enjoyment would be sympathized in. Our 
host had been a nobleman's travelling valet, and he amused 
us with his descriptions of our friends, every one of whom 
he perfectly remembered. He had learned to use his eyes, 
at least, and made very shrewd guesses at the condition 
and tempers of his visitors. His life, in that lonely inn, 
must be in sufficient contrast with his former vocation. 

We had jolted sixteen miles behind our Highland horse, 
but he came out fresh for the remaining twenty of our days' 
journey, and with cushions of dried and fragrant fern, 
gathered and put in by our considerate landlord, we crossed 
the ferry and turned eastward into the far-famed and much 
Doasted valley of Glencoe, 



INTARERDENt 423 

LETTER XXVIL 

THE HIGHLANDS. 

INVARERDEN TARBET— - COCKNEY TOURISTS LOCH LOMOND — IN- 

VERSNAID ROB ROY'S CAVE DISCOMFITURE — THE BIRTH-PLACE 

OF HELEN MCGREGOR. 

Oct, 1834. 

We passed the head of the valley near Tyndrum, where 
M'Dougal of Lorn defeated the Bruce, and were half way 
up the wild pass that makes its southern outlet, when our 
Highland driver, with a shout of delight, pointed out to us 
a red deer, standing on the very summit of the highest 
mountain ahove us. It was an incredible distance to see 
any living thing, but he stood clear against the sky, in a 
relief as strong as if he had been suspended in the air, and 
with his head up, and his chest toward us, seemed the true 
monarch of the wild. 

At Invarerden, Donald MThee begged for the discharge 
of himself and his horse and cart from our service. He had 
come with us eighty miles, and was afraid to venture farther 
on his travels, having never before been twenty miles from 
the Highland village where he lived. It was amusing to 
see the curiosity with which he looked about him, and the 
caution with which he suffered the hostler at the inn to 
take the black mare out of his sight. The responsibility of 
the horse and cart weighed heavily on his mind, and he 
expressed his hope " to get ta beast back safe," with an 
apprehensive resolution that would have become a knight- 
errant guiding himself for his most perilous encounter. 
Poor Donald ! how little he knew how wide is the world, 
and how very like one part of it is to another ! 

Our host of Invarerden supplied us with another cart to 
take us down to Tarbet, and having dined, with a waterfall 
looking in at each of our two opposite windows, (the inn 
stands in a valley between two mountains) we were com- 
mitted to the care of his eldest boy, and jolted off for the 
head of Loch Lomond. 

I have never happened to see a traveller who had seen 



4A4t PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

Loch Lomond in perfectly good weather. My companion 
had been there every summer for several years, and believed 
it always rained under Ben Lomond. As we came in sight 
of the lake, however, the water looked like one sheet of 
gold-leaf, trembling as if by the motion of fish below, but 
unruffled by wind ; and if paradise were made so fair, and 
had such waters in its midst, I could better conceive, than 
before, the unhappiness of Adam when driven forth. The 
sun wa^ just setting, and the road descended immediately to 
the slrere, and kept along under precipitous rocks, and slopes 
of alternate cultivation and heather, to the place of our 
destination. And a lovely place it is ! Send me to Tarbet 
when I would retreat from the world! It is an inn 
buried in a grove at the foot of the hills, and set in a bend 
of the lake shore, like a diamond upon an " orbed brow ;" 
and the light in its kitchen, as we approached in the twi- 
light, was as interesting as a ray of the " first water " from 
the same. We had now reached the route of the cockney 
tourists ; and while we perceived it agreeably in the excel- 
lence of the hotel, we perceived it disagreeably in the price 
of the wines, and the presence of what my friend called 
" unmitigated vulgarians" in the coffee-room. That is the 
worst of England. The people are vulgar, but not vulgar 
enough. One dances with the lazzaroni at Naples, when 
he would scarce think of handing the newspaper to the 
"person" on a tour at Tarbet. 

Well — it was moonlight. The wind was south and affec- 
tionate, and the road in front of the hotel t€ flecked with 
silver ;" and my friend's wife, and the corresponding object 
of interest to myself, being on the other side of Ben Lomond 
and the Tweed, we had nothing for it after supper but to 
walk up and down with one another, and talk of the past. 
In the course of our ramble, we walked through an open 
gate, and, ascending a gravel-walk, found a beautiful cottage, 
built between two mountain streams, and ornamented with 
every device of taste and contrivance. The mild pure tor- 
rents were led over falls, and brought to the thresholds of 
bowers ; and seats and bridges and winding-paths were dis- 
tributed up the steep channels, in a way that might make 
it a haunt for Titania. It is the property, we found after- 
ward, of a Scotch gentleman, and a great summer-retreat 



IWERSNAID. 425 

of the celebrated Jeffery, his friend. It was one more place 
to which my heart clung in parting. 

Loch Lomond still sat for its picture in the morning, and, 
after an early breakfast, we took a row-boat, with a couple 
of Highlanders, for Inversnaid, and pulled across the lake 
with a kind of drowsy delightfulness in the scene and air 
which I have never before found out of Italy. We overshot 
our destination a little to look into Rob Roy's Cave, a dark 
den in the face of the rock, which has the look of his voca- 
tion ; and then, pulling back along the shore, we were 
landed, in the spray of a waterfall, at a cottage occupied by 
the boatmen of this Highland ferry. From this point across 
to Loch Katrine, is some five miles, and the scene of Scott's 
novel of " Rob Roy." It has been " done " so often by 
tourists, that I leave all particular description of the lo- 
calities and scenery to the well-hammered remembrance 
of readers of magazines, and confine myself to my own 
private adventures. 

The distance between the lakes is usually performed by 
ladies on donkeys, and by gentlemen on foot ; but being 
myself rather tender-toed with the gout, my companion 
started off alone, and I lay down on the grass at Inversnaid 
to wait the return of the long-eared troop, who were gone 
across with an earlier party. The waterfall and the cottage 
just above the edge of the lake ; a sharp hill behind, closely 
wooded with birch and fir, and, on a green sward platform 
in the rear of the house, two Highland lassies and a laddie, 
treading down a stack of new hay, were not bad circum- 
stances in which to be left alone with the witcheries of the 
great enchanter. 

I must narrate here an adventure in which my own part 
was rather a discomfiture, but which will shew somewhat the 
manners of the people. My companion had been gone half 
an hour, and I was lying at the foot of a tree, listening to 
the waterfall and looking off on the lake, and watching, by 
fits, the lads and lasses I have spoken of, who were building 
a haystack between them, and chattering away most unceas- 
ingly in Gaelic. The eldest of the girls was a tall, ill- 
favoured damsel, merry as an Oread, but as ugly as Donald 
Bean ; and, after a while, I began to suspect, by the looks 
of the boy below, that I had furnished her with a new 



426 JMSNCIfrLINGS BY THE WAY. 

theme. She addressed some remark to me presently, and 
a skirmish of banter ensued, which ended in a challenge to 
me to climb up on the stack. It was about ten feet high, 
and shelving outward from the bottom, and my Armida 
had drawn up the ladder. The stack was built, however, 
under a high tree, and I was soon up the trunk, and, swing- 
ing off from a long branch, dropped into the middle of the 
stack. In the same instant, I was raised in a grasp to 
which I could offer no resistance, and, with a fling to 
which I should have believed few men equal, thrown clear 
off the stack to the ground. I alighted on my back, with 
a fall of, perhaps, twelve feet, and felt seriously hurt. The 
next moment, however, my gentle friend had me in her 
arms, (I am six feet high in my stockings) and I was carried 
into the cottage, and laid on a flock-bed, before I could well 
decide whether my back was broken or no. Whiskey was 
applied externally and internally ; and the old crone, who 
was the only inhabitant of the hovel, commenced, a lecture 
in Gaelic, as I stood once more sound upon my legs, which 
seemed to take effect upon the penitent, though her victim 
was no wiser for it. I took the opportunity to look at the 
frame which had proved itself of such vigorous power ! but, 
except arms of extraordinary length, she was like any other 
equally ugly, middle-sized woman. In the remaining half 
hour, before the donkeys arrived, we became the best of 
friends, and she set me off for Loch Katrine, with a caution 
to the ass-driver to take care of me, which that sandy-haired 
Highlander took as an excellent joke. And no wonder ! 

The long mountain-glen between these two lakes was 
the home of Rob Roy, and the Highlanders point out 
various localities, all commemorated in Scott's incomparable 
story. The house where Helen MacGregor was born lies 
a stone's throw off the road to the left, and Rob's gun h 
shown by an old woman who lives near by. He must have 
been rich in arms by the same token ; for, beside the w r ell- 
authenticated one at Abbotsford, I have seen some dozen 
guns, and twice as many daggers and shot-pouches, which 
lay claim to the same honour. I paid my shilling to the old 
woman not the less. She owed it to the pleasure I had 
received from Sir Walter's novel. 

The view of Loch Lomond back from the highest point 



AN ADVENTURE. 427 

of the pass is incomparably fine 5 at least when I saw it; 
for sunshine and temperature, and the effect of the light 
vapours on the hills, were at their loveliest and most favour- 
able. It looks more like the haunt of a robber and his 
caterans, probably, in its more common garb of Scotch mist ; 
but, to my eye, it was a scene of the most Arcadian peace 
and serenity. I dawdled along the five miles upon my 
donkey, with something of an ache in my back, but a very 
healthful and sunny freedom from pain and impatience at 
my heart. And so did not Bailie Nicol Jarvie make the 
same memorable journey. 



' LETTER XXVIII. 



HIGHLAND HUT, ITS FURNITURE AND INMATES HIGHLAND 

AMUSEMENT AND DINNER—' ROB ROY,' AND SCENERY OF THE 
6 LADY OF THE LAKE.' 

Oct. 1834. 

The cottage-inn at the head of Loch Katrine was tenanted 
by a woman who might have been a horse-guardsman in 
petticoats, and who kept her smiles for other cattle than 
the Sassenach. We bought her whiskey and milk, praised 
her butter, and were civil to the little Highlandman at her 
breast ; but neither mother nor child were to be mollified. 
The rocks were bare around : we were too tired for a pull 
in the boat, and three mortal hours lay between us and the 
nearest event in our history. I first penetrated, in the 
absence of our Hecate, to the inner room of the shieling. 
On the wall hung a broadsword, two guns, a trophy or two 
of deers' horns, and a Sunday suit of plaid, philibeg and 
short red coat, surmounted by a gallant bonnet and feather. 
Four cribs, like the berths in a ship, occupied the farther 
side of the chamber, each large enough to contain two per- 
sons 5 a snow-white table stood between the windows ; a 
sixpenny glass, with an eagle's feather stuck in the frame, 
hung at such a height that , " though tall of my hands," I 
could just see my nose ; and just under the ceiling on the 
left was a broad and capacious shelf, on which reposed 



428 PENCILLINGS »Y THE WAY. 

apparently the old clothes of a century — a sort of place where 
the gude-wife would have hidden Prince Charlie, or might 
rummage for her grandmother's baby-linen. 

The heavy steps of the dame came over the threshold, 
and I began to doubt, from the look in her eyes, whether I 
should get a blow of her hairy arm or a * persuader " from 
the butt of a gun for my intrusion. 

e< What are ye wantin' here ? m she speercd at me, with 
.a Helen MacGregor-to-Bailie-Nicol-Jarvie-sort-of-an-ex- 
pression. ? 

" I was looking for a potato to roast my good woman." 

cc Is that a* ? Ye '11 find it ayont, then ;" and, pointing 
to a bag in the corner, she stood while 1 substracted the 
largest, and then followed me to the general kitchen and 
receiving-room, where I buried my improvista dinner in 
the remains of the peat fire, and congratulated myself on 
my ready apology. 

What to do while the potato was roasting ! My English 
friend had already cleaned his gun for amusement, and I 
liad looked on. We had stoned the pony till he had got 
beyond us in the morass, {small thanks to us, if the dame 
knew it.) We had tried ts make a chicken swim ashore 
from the boat ; we had tired away all my friend's percus- 
sion-caps, and there was nothing for it but to converse 
d rigueur. We lay on our barks till the dame brought us 
the hot potato on a shovel, with oat-cake and butter, and, 
with this Highland dinner, the last hour came decently to 
its death. 

An Englishman, with his wife and lady's-maid, came 
over the hills with a boat's crew; and a lassie who was not 
very pretty, but who lived on the lake and had found the 
means to get " Captain Rob" and his men pretty well 
under her thumb. We were all embarked, the lassie in 
the stern-sheets with the captain; and ourselves, though 
we "paid the Scot," of no more consideration than our 
portmanteaus. I was amused, for it was the first instance 
I had seen in any country, (my own not excepted) of 
thorough emancipation from the distinction of superiors 
and inferiors. Luckily the girl was bent on showing the 
captain to advantage, and by ingenious prompting and 
catechism she induced him to do what probably was his 



THE TROSACHS. 42£ 

custom when he could not better amuse himself— point out 
the localities as the boat sped on, and quote the ' Lady of 
the Lake/ with an accent which made it a piece of good 
fortune to have " crammed " the poem beforehand. 

The shores of the lake are flat and uninteresting at the 
head, but, toward the scene of Scott's romance, they rise 
into bold precipices, and gradually become worthy of their 
celebrity. The Trosachs are a cluster of small, green 
nountains, strewn, or rather piled, with shrubs of mossy 
verdure, and from a distance you would think only a bird, 
or Ranald of the Mist, could penetrate their labyrinthine 
recesses. Captain Rob showed us successively the Braes 
of Balquidder, Rob Roy's birth and burial place, Benledi,. 
and the crag from which hung, by the well-woven skirts 
of et braidclaith," the worthy bailie of Glasgow ; and, be- 
neath a precipice of remarkable wildness, the half-intoxi- 
cated steersman raised his arm and began to repeat, in the 
most unmitigated gutturals : 

" High ower the south huge Benwwue 
Down to the lake his masses threw, 
Crags, knowls and mounds confusedly hurl'd 
The fragments of an earlier wurruUd!" 

I have underlined it according to the captain's judicious 
emphasis, and in the last word have endeavoured to spell 
after his remarkable pronunciation. Probably to a French- 
man, however, it would have seemed all very fine — for 
Captain Rob (I must do him justice, though he broke the 
strap of my portmanteau) was as good-looking a ruffian as 
you would sketch on a summers tour. 

Some of the loveliest water I have ever seen in my life, 
(and I am rather an amateur of that element — to look at) 
lies deep down at the basis of the divine Trosachs, The 
usual approaches from lake to mountain (beach or sloping 
shore) are here dispensed with ; and, straight up from the 
deep water, rise the green precipices and bold and ragged 
rocks, oveaihadowing the glassy mirror below, with tints 
like a c©ol corner in a landscape of Ruysdael's. It is some- 
thing — (indeed, on a second thought, exceedingly) like 
Lake George ; only that the islands in this extremity of 
Loch Katrine lie closer together, and permit the sun no 



$30 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

entrance except by a ray almost perpendicular. A painter 
will easily understand the effect of this — the loss of all that 
makes a surface to the water, and the consequent far depth 
to the eye, as if the boat in which you shot over it, brought 
with it its own water and sent its ripple through the trans- 
parent air. I write currente calamo, and have no time to 
clear up my meaning, but it will be evident to all lovers of 
nature. 

Captain Rob put up his helm for a little fairy, green 
island, lying like a lapful of moss on the water, and, round- 
ing a point, we ran suddenly into a cove sheltered by a tree, 
and in a moment the boat grated on the pebbles of a natural 
beach, perhaps ten feet in length. A flight of winding 
steps, made roughly of roots and stones, ascended from the 
water's edge. 

" Gentlemen and Ladies ! " said the captain, with a hic- 
cup, "this is Ellen's Isle. This is the gnarled oak," (catch- 
ing at a branch of the tree as the boat swung astern,) " and 

you 11 please to go up them steps, and I '11 tell ye the 

rest in Ellen's bower." 

The Highland lassie sprang on shore, and we followed 
up the steep ascent, arriving breathless at last at the door 
of) a fanciful bower, built by Lord Willoughby D'Eresby, 
(the owner of the island) exactly after the description in 
the ' Lady of the Lake/ The chairs were made of crooked 
branches of trees and covered with deer-skins, the tables 
were laden with armour and every variety of weapon, and 
the rough beams of the building were hung with antlers 
and other spoils of the chase. 

" Here 's whaur she lived ! " said the captain, with the 
gravity of a cicerone at the Forum, "and noo, if ye '11 come 
out, I '11 show you the echo." 

We followed to the highest point of the island, and the 
Highlandman gave a scream that showed considerable prac- 
tice, but I thought he would have burst his throat in the 
effort. The awful echo went round, " as mentioned in the 
bill of performance/' every separate mountain screaming 
back the discord till you would have thought the Trosachs 
a crew of mocking giants. It was a wonderful echo, but, 
like most wonders, I could have been content to have had 
less for my money. 



A CICERONE. 431 

, There was a <e small silver beach " on the mainland op- 
posite, and above it a high mass of mountain. 

" There/' said the captain, (< gentlemen and ladies, is 
whaur Fitz-James blow'd his bugle, and waited for the 
c light shallop ' of Ellen Douglas ; and here, where you 
landed and came up them steps, is where she brought him 
to the bower, and the very tree 's still there, (as you see'd 
me tak' hold o' it) and ower the hill, yonder, is where the 
' gallant gray ' giv out and breath'd his last, and (will you 
turn round, if you please, them that likes) yonder's where 
Fitz-James met Red Murdoch that killed Blaunche of 
Devon, and right across this water swum young Graeme 
that disdained the regular boat, and I s'pose on that lower 
step set the ould harper and Ellen mony a time a-watching 
for Douglas ; and now if you'd like to hear the echo ance 
mair — " 

. " Heaven forbid ! " was the universal cry; and in fear 
of our ears, we put the bower between us and Captain 
Rob's lungs, and followed the Highland girl back to the 
boat. 

. From Ellen's Isle to the head of the small creek, so 
beautifully described in the ' Lady of the Lake,' the scenery 
has the same air of lavish and graceful vegetation, and the 
same features of mingled boldness and beauty. It was a 
spot altogether that one is sure to live much in with, 
memory. I see it as clearly now as then. 

The whiskey had circulated pretty freely among the 
crew, and all were more or less intoxicated. Captain Rob's 
first feat on his legs was to drop my friend's gun-case and 
break it to pieces, for which he instantly got a cuff between 
the eyes from the boxing dandy, that would have done the 
business for a softer head. The Scot was a powerful fellow, 
and I anticipated a row ; but the tremendous power of the 
blow, and the skill with which it was planted, quite sub- 
dued him. He rose from the grass as white as a sheet, but 
quietly shouldered the portmanteau with which he had 
fallen, and trudged on with sobered steps to the inn. 

We took a post-chaise immediately for Callender, and it 

was not till we were five miles from the foot of the lake 

I that I lost my apprehensions of an apparition of the High- 



ander from the darkening woods. We arrived at Callender 



432 PENC1LLINGS BY THE WAY. 

at nine, and the next morning at sunrise were on our way] 
to breakfast at Stirling. 



LETTER XXIX. 
STIRLING. 



SCOTTISH STAGES — THOROUGH-BRED SETTER — SCENERY — FEMALE 
PEASANTRY — MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS — STIRLING CASTLE. 

Oct, 1834. 

The lakes of Scotland are without the limits of stage-coach 
and post-horse civilization, and to arrive at these pleasant 
conveniences is to be consoled for the corresponding change 
in the character of the scenery. From Callender there is a 
coach to Stirling, and it was on the top of the " High- 
lander/* (a brilliant red coach, with a picture of Rob Roy 
on the panels) that, with my friend and his dog, I was on 
the road, bright and early, for the banks of the Teith. 
I have scarce done justice, by the way, to my last-men- 
tioned companion (a superb, thorough-bred setter, who 
answered to the derogatory appellation of * Flirt/') for he 
had accompanied me in most of my wanderings for a couple 
of months, and his society had been preferred to that of 
many a reasoning animal on the road, in the frequent dearth 
of amusement. Flirt's pedigree had been taken on trust 
by my friend, the dog-fancier, of whom he was bought, 
only knowing that he came of a famous race, belonging to 
a gentleman living somewhere between Stirling and Cal- 
lender ; and to determine his birth-place and get another of 
the same breed, was a greater object with his master than 
to see all the lakes and mountains of Caledonia. Poor Flirt 
was elevated to the highest seat on the coach, little aware 
that his reputation for birth and breeding depended on his 
recognising the scenes of his puppyhood — for if his former 
master had told truly, these were the fields where his young 
ideas had been taught a dog's share in shooting, and his 
unconscious tail and ears were now under watchful surveil* 
lance for a betrayal of his presumed reminiscences. 



DOUNE CASTLE. 433 

The coach rolled on over the dew -damp road, crossing 
continually those bright and sparkling rivulets which glad- 
den the favoured neighbourhood of mountains ; and the 
fields and farm-houses took gradually the look of thrift and 
care, which indicates an approach tc a thickly- settled coun- 
try. The castle of Doune, a lovely hunting-seat of the 
Queen of Scots, appeared in the distance, w T ith its gray 
towers half buried in trees, when Flirt began to look before 
and behind, and take less notice of the shabby gentleman 
on his left, who, from sharing with him a volant breakfast 
of bread and bacon, had hitherto received the most of his 
attention. We kept on at a pretty pace, and Flirt's tail 
shifted sides once or twice with a very decided whisk, and 
his intelligent head gradually grew more erect upon his 
neck of white-and-tan. It was evident he had travelled 
the road before. Still on, and as the pellucid Teith began 
to reflect in her eddying mirror the towers of castle Doune 
— a scene worthy of its tender and chivalrous associations 
—a suppressed whine and a fixed look over the fields to the 
right, satisfied us that the soul of the setter was stirring 
with the recognition of the past. The coach was stopped 
and Flirt loosed from his chain, and, with a promise to join 
me at Stirling at dinner, my friend " hied away " the 
delighted dog over the hedge, and followed himself on foot, 
to visit, by canine guidance, the birthplace of this accom- 
plished family. It was quite beautiful to see the fine 
creature beat the field over and over in his impatience, 
returning to his slower-footed master, as if to hurry him 
onward, and leaping about him with an extravagance 
eloquent of such unusual joy. I lost sight of them by a 
turning in the road, and reverted for consolation to that 
loveliest river, on whose green bank I could have lain (had 
I breakfasted) and dreamed till the sunset, of the unfortu- 
nate queen, for whose soft eyes and loving heart it perhaps 
flowed no more brightly in the days of Rizzio, than now for 
mine and those of the early marketers to Stirling. 

The road was thronged with carts, and peasants in their 
best attire. The gentleman who had provided against the 
enemy with a brown paper of bread and bacon, informed 
me that it was market day. A very great proportion of 
the country people were women and girls, walking all cf 

£ F 



434 PENC1LLINGS BY THE WAY. 

them barefoot, but with shoes in their hands, and gowns 
and bonnets that would have eclipsed in finery the bevy 
of noble ladies at Gordon castle. Leghorn straw hats and 
dresses of silk, with ribands of any quantity and brilliancy, 
were the commonest articles. Feet excepted, however, (for 
they had no triflers of pedestals, and stumped along the 
road with a sovereign independence of pools and pebbles) 
they were a wholesome -looking and rather pretty class of 
females ; and. with the exception of here and there a prim 
lassie, who dropped her dress over her feet while the coach 
passed, and hid her shoes under her handkerchief, they 
seemed perfectly satisfied with their own mode of convey- 
ance, and gave us a smile in passing, which said very dis- 
tinctly, ie you '11 be there before us, but it 's only seven 
miles, and we '11 foot it in time." How various are the joys 
of life ! I went on with the coach, wondering whether I 
ever could be reduced to find pleasure in walking ten miles 
barefoot to a fair — and back again ! 

I thought again of Mary, as the turrets of the proud 
castle where she was crowned became more distinct in the 
approach — but it is difficult in entering a crowded town, 
with a real breakfast in prospect and live Scotchmen about 
me, to remember with any continuous enthusiasm even the 
mos* brilliant events of history. 

" Can history cut my hay or get my corn in ? 
Or can philosophy vend it in the market ?" 

says somebody in the play, and with a similar thought I 
looked up at the lofty towers of the home of Scotland's 
kings, as the " Highlander" bowled round its rocky base to 
the inn. The landlord appeared with his white apron, 
" boots " with his ladder, the coachman and guard with 
their hints to your memory ; and having ordered breakfast 
of the first, descended the " convenience " of the second, 
and received a tip of the hat for a shilling to the remaining 
two, I was at liberty to walk up stairs and while away a 
melancholy half hour in humming such charitable stanzas 
as would come uncalled to my aid. 

'* Oh for a plump fat leg of mutton, 
Veal, lamb, capon, pig and coney ! 
None is happy but a glutton, 

None an ass but who w^nts money.'* 



STIRLING CASTLE. 435 

So sang the servant of Diogenes, with an exception- 
able morality, which, nevertheless, it is difficult to get 
out of one's head at Stirling, if one has not already break- 
fasted. 

* * * * * * 

I limped up the long street leading to the castle, stop- 
ping on the way to look at a group of natives who were 
gaping at an advertisement just stuck to the wall, offering 
to take emigrants to New- York on terms (l ridiculously 
trifling." Remembering the " bannocks o* barley meal " I 
had eaten for breakfast, the haddocks and marmalade, the 
cold grouse and porridge, I longed to pull Sawney by the 
coat and tell him he was just as well where he was. Yet 
the temptation of the Greenock trader, " cheap and nasty '* 
though it were, was not uninviting to me ! 

I was met on the drawbridge of the castle by a trim cor- 
poral, who offered to show me the lions for a " considera- 
tion." I put myself under his guidance and he took me to 
Queen Mary's apartments, used at present for a mess-room , 
to the chamber where Earl Douglas was murdered, etc. etc. 
etc., in particulars which are accurately treated of in the 
guide-books. The pipers were playing in the court, and a 
company or two of a Highland regiment, in their tartans 
and feathers, were under parade. This was attractive m taL 
to me, and I sat down on a parapet, where I soon struck 
up a friendship with a curly-headed varlet, some four years 
old, who shouldered my stick without the ceremony of " by- 
your-leave," and commenced the drill upon an unwa bed 
regiment of his equals in a sunshiny corner below. It was 
delightful to see their gravity and the military air with 
which they cocked their bonnets and stuck out their little 
round stomachs at the word of command. My little Cap- 
tain Cockchafer returned my stick like a knight of honour, 
and familiarly climbed upon my knee to repose after his 
campaign, very much to the surprise of his mother, who 
was hanging out to dry, what looked like his father's inex- 
pressibles, from a window above, and who came down and 
apologized in the most unmitigated Scotch for the liberty 
the i( babby " had taken with " his honour." For the child 
of a camp-follower, it was a gallant boy, and I remember 
him better than the drill-sergeant or the piper. 

2 f 2 



436 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

On the north side of Stirling Castle the view is bounded 
T)y the Grampians and laced by the winding Teith ; and 
*ust under the battlements lies a green hollow, called the 
"King's Knot," where the gay tournaments were held, and 
the (C Ladies' Hill,'' where sat the gay and lovely spectators 
of the chivalry of Scotland. Heading Hill is near it, where 
James executed Albany and his sons, and the scenes and 
events of history and poetry are thickly sown at your feet. 
Once recapitulated, however — the Bruce and the Douglas, 
Mary and the " Gudeman of Ballengiech," once honoured 
in memory — the surpassing beauty of the prospect from 
Stirling towers engross the fancy and fill the eye. It was a 
day of predominant sunshine, with here and there the sha- 
dow of a cloud darkening a field of stubble or a bend of the 
river, and I wandered round from bastion to bastion, never 
sated with gazing, and returning continually to the points 
from which the corporal had hurried me on. There lay the 
Forth — here Bannockburn and Falkirk, and all bathed and 
flooded with beauty. Let him who thinks the earth ill- 
looking peep at it through the embrasures of Stirling 
Castle. 

My friend, the corporal, got but sixteen pence a day, and 
had a wife and children ; but much as I should dislike all 
three as disconnected items, I envied him his lot altogether. 
A garrison life at Stirling, and plenty of leisure, would 
reconcile one almost to wife and children and a couple of 
pistareens per diem. 



LETTER XXX. 

.SCOTCH SCENERY A RACE — CHEAPNESS OF LODGINGS IN ELIN- 

BURGH ABBOTSFORD SCOTT LORD DALHOUSIE THOMAS 

MOORE — JANE PORTER — THE GRAVE OF SCOTT. 

Oct 1834. 

I was delighted to find Stirling rather woise than Albany 
in the matter of steamers. I had a running fight for my 
portmanteau and carpet-bag from the hotel to the pier, and 
was at last embarked in entirely the wrong boat, by sheer 



SCOTCH STEAM»BOATS. 437 

force of pulling and lying. They could scarce have put me 
in -a greater rage between Cruttenden's and the Overslaugh. 
The two rival steamers, the " Victory " and the " Bert 
Lomond/' got under weigh together ; the former, in which 
I was a compulsory passenger, having a flageolet and a bass- 
drum by way of a band, and the other a dozen lusty per- 
formers and most of the company. The river was very- 
narrow and the tide down, and though the other was the 
better boat, we had the bolder pilot and were lighter laden 
and twice as desperate. I found my own spunk stirred 
irresistibly after the first mile. We were contending against 
odds, and there was something in it that touched my Ame- 
ricanism nearly. We had three small boys mounted on the 
box over the wheel, who cheered and waved their hats at 
our momentary advantages; but the channel was full of 
windings, and if we gained on the larboard tack we lest on 
the starboard. Whenever we were quite abreast, and the 
wheels touched with the narrowness of the river, we 
marched our flageolet and bass-drum close to the enemy 
and gave them a blast f< to wake the dead/' taking occasion, 
during our moments of defeat, to recover breath and ply 
the principal musician with beer and encouragement. It 
was a scene for Cooper to describe. The two pilots stood 
broad on their legs, every muscle on the alert ; and though 
Ben Lomond wore the cleaner jacket, Victory had the 
fe varminter " look. You would have bet on Victory to 
have seen the man. He was that wickedest of all wicked- 
looking things, a wicked Scotchman — a sort of saint- turned 
ginner. The expression of early good principles was glazed 
over with drink and recklessness, like a scene from the 
Inferno painted over a Madonna of Raphael's. It was 
written in his face that he was a transgressor against know- 
ledge. We were, perhaps, a half-dozen passengers, exclu- 
sive of the boys, and we rallied round our Bard olph -nosed 
hero and applauded his skilful manoeuvres ; sun, steam, and 
excitement together producing a temperature on deck that 
left nothing to dread from the boiler. As we approached a 
sharp bend in the course of the stream, I perceived, by the 
countenance of our pilot, that it was to be a critical moment. 
The Ben Lomond was a little a- head, but we had the ad- 
vantage of the inside of the course, and very soon, with the 



438 FENCILLNGS BY THE WAY. 

commencement of the curve, we gained sensibly on the 
enemy, and I saw clearly that we should cut her off by a 
half-boat's length. The three boys on the wheel began to 
shout, the flageolet made all split again with " the Camp- 
bells are comin V the bass-drum was never so belaboured, 
and iC up with your helm !" cried every voice, as we came 
at the rate of twelve miles in the hour sharp on to the 
angle of mud and buhushes, and, to our utter surprise, the 
pilot jammed down his tiller, and ran the battered nose of 
the Victory plump in upon the enemy's forward quarter i 
The next moment we were going it like mad down the 
middle of the river, and far astern stuck the Ben Lomond 
in the mud, her paddles driving her deeper at every stroke, 
her music hushed, and the crowd on her deck standing 
speechless with amazement. The flageolet and bass-drum 
marched aft and played louder than ever, and we were 
soon in the open Firth, getting an merrily, but without 
competition, to the sleeping isle of Inchkeith. Lucky Vic- 
tory ! luckier pilot ! to have found an historian ! How 
many a red-nosed Palinurus — how many a bass-drum and 
flageolet have done their duty as well, yet achieved no im- 
mortality ! 

I was glad to see " Auld Reekie" again, though the 
influx of strangers to the " Scientific Meeting " had over- 
run every hotel, and I was an hour or two without a home* 
I lit at last upon a good old Scotchwoman who had " a 
flat " to herself, and who, for the sum of one shilling and 
sixpence per diem, proposed to transfer her only boarder 
from his bed to a sofa, as long as I should wish to say. I 
made a humane remonstrance against the inconvenience to 
her friend. " It's only a Jew/' she said, " and they're no 
difficult, puir bodies ! *' The Hebrew came in while we 
were debating the point — a smirking gentleman, with very 
elaborated whiskers, much better dressed than the proposed 
usurper of his sanctum — and without the slightest hesita- 
tion professed, that nothing would give him so much pain 
as to stand in the way of his landlady's interest. So for 
eighteen pence (and 1 could not prevail on her to take ano- 
ther farthing) I had a Jew put to inconvenience, a bed, 
fcoots and clothes brushed, and Mrs. Mac to sit up for 



ABBOTSFORD. 439 

me till two in the morning — what the Jew himself would 

have called a " cheap article." 

****** 

I returned to my delightful head-quarters at Dalhousie 
Castle on the following day, and, among many excursions 
in the neighbourhood during the ensuing week, accom- 
plished a visit to Abbotsford. The most interesting of all 
spots has been so minutely and so often described, that a 
detailed account of it would be a mere repetition. Descrip- 
tion, however, has anticipated nothing to the visitor. The 
home of Sir Walter Scott would possess an interest to thrill 
the heart, if it were as well painted to the eye of fancy as 
the homes of his own heroes. 

It is a dreary country about Abbotsford, and the house 
itself looks from a distance like a small, low castle, buried 
in stunted trees, on - the side of a long, sloping upland or 
moor. The river is between you and the chateau as you 
come down to Melrose from the north, and you see the 
gray towers opposite you from the road at the distance of a 
mile — the only habitable spot in an almost desolate waste 
of country. From the town of Melrose you approach 
Abbotsford by a long, green lane, and, from the height of 
the hedge, and the descending ground on which the house 
is built, you would scarce suspect its vicinity till you enter 
a small gate on the right and find yourself in an avenue of 
young trees. This conducts you immediately to the door, 
and the first effect on me was that of a spacious castle seen 
through a reversed glass. In fact it is a kind of castle 
cottage — not larger than what is often called a cottage in 
England, yet to the minutest point and proportion a model 
of an ancient castle. The deception in the engravings of 
the place lies in the scale. It seems like a vast building as 
usually drawn. 

One or two hounds were lounging round the door $ but 
the only tenant of the place was a slovenly housemaid, 
whom we interrupted in the profane task of scrubbing the 
furniture in the library. I could have pitched her and her 
scrubbing-brushes out of the window with a good will. It 
really is a pity that this sacred place, with its thousand 
valuable and irreplaceable curiosities, should be so care- 
lessly neglected. We were left to wander over the house 



440 PENCILLTNGS BY THE WAY, 

and the museum as we liked. I could have brought away 
(and nothing is more common than this species of theft in 
England) twenty things from that rare collection, of which 
the value could scarce be estimated. The pistols and dagger 
of Rob Rov, and a hundred equally valuable and pocketable 
things, lay on the shelves unprotected, quite at the mercy 
of the ill-disposed, to say nothing of the merciless "clean- 
ings" of the housemaid. The present Sir Walter Scott is 
a major of dragoons, with his regiment in Ireland, and the 
place is never occupied by the family. Why does no* 
Scotland buy Abbotsford, and secure to herself, while it is 
still perfect, the home of her great magician, and the spot 
that to after ages would be, if preserved in its curious de- 
tails, the most interesting in Great Britain ? 

After showing us the principal rooms, the woman opened 
a small closet adjoining the study, in which hung the last 
clothes that Sir Walter had worn. There was the broad- 
skirted blue coat with large buttons, the plaid trousers, the 
heavy shoes, the broad-rimmed hat and stout walking-stick 
— the dress in which he rambled about in the morning, 
and which he laid off when he took to his bed in his last 
illness. She took down the coat and gave it a shake and a 
wipe of the collar, as if he were waiting to put it on again ! 

It was encroaching somewhat on the province of Touch- 
stone and Wamba to moralize on a suit of clothes — but I 
am convinced that I got from them a better idea of Scott, 
as he was in his familiar hours, than any man can have 
who has seen neither him or them. There was a character 
in the hat and shoes. The coat was an honest and hearty 
coat. The stout, rough walking-stick seemed as if it 
could have belonged to no other man. I appeal to my 
kind friends and fellow-travellers who were there three 
days before me, (I saw their names on the book) if the 
same impression was not made on them. 

I asked for the room in which Sir Walter died. She 
showed it to me, and the place where the bed had stood, 
which was now removed. I was curious to see the wall or 
the picture over which his last looks must have passed. 
Directly opposite the foot of the bed hung a remarkable 
picture — the head of Mary Queen of Scots in a dish, taken 
after her execution. The features were composed and 



SIR WALTER SCOTT, 441 

"beautiful. On either side of it hung spirited drawings 
from the Tales of a Grandfather — one very clever sketch, 
representing the wife of a border-knight serving up her 
husband's spurs for dinner, to remind him of the poverty of 
the larder and the necessity of a foray. On the left side of 
the bed was a broad window to the west — the entrance of 
the last light to his eyes — and from hence had sped the 
greatest spirit that has walked the world since Shakspeare. 
It almost makes the heart stand still to be silent and alone 
on such a spot ! 

What an interest there is in the trees of Abbotsford — 
planted every one by the same hand that waved its wand 
of enchantment over the world ! One walks among them 
as if they had thoughts and memories. 

Every body talks of Scott who has ever had the happiness 
of seeing him, and.it is strange how interesting it is, even 
when there is no anecdote, and only the most commonplace 
interview is narrated. I have heard, since 1 have been in 
England, hundreds of people describe their conversations 
with him, and never the dullest without a certain interest 
far beyond that of common topics. Some of these have been 
celebrated people, and there is the additional weight that 
they were honoured friends of Sir Walter's. 

Lord D — told me that he was Scott's play-fellow at the 
high School of Edinburgh. There was a peculiar arrange- 
ment of the benches with a head and foot, so that the boys 
sat above or below, according to their success in recitation. 
It so happened that the warmest seat in the school, that 
next to the stove, was about two from the bottom, and this 
Scott, who was a very good scholar, contrived never to 
leave. He stuck to his seat from autumn to spring, never 
so deficient as to get down, and never choosing to answer 
rightly if the result was to go up. He was very lame, and 
seldom shared in the sports of the other boys, but was a 
prodigious favourite, and loved to sit in the sunshine, with 
a knot of bovs round him telling stories. Lord Balhousie's 
friendship with him was uninterrupted through life, and 
he invariably breakfasted at the Castle on his way to and 
from Edinburgh. 

I met M at a dinner-party not long since, and Scott 

was again (as at a previous dinner I have described) the 



442 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

subject of conversation. " He was the soul of honesty ," 

said M . " When I was on a visit to him, we were 

coming up from Kelso at sunset, and as there was to be a 
fine moon, I quoted to him his own rule for seeing c fair 
Melrose aright * and proposed to stay an hour and enjoy it. 
* Bah !' said Scott, ' I never saw it by moonlight:' Wo 
went, however ; and Scott, who seemed to be on the most 
familiar terms with the cicerone, pointed to an empty niche, 
and said to him, e I think, by the way, that I have a Virgin 
and Child that will just do for your niche. I'll send it to 
you/ ' How happy you have made that man !' said I to 
him. 'Oh/ said Scott, 'it was always in the way, and 
Madam S. is constantly grudging it house-room. We're 
well rid of it.'" 

"Any other man" said M , "would have allowed 

himself at least the credit of a kind action." I have had 
the happiness since I have been in England of passing some 

weeks at a country-house where Miss Jane P was an 

honoured guest, and, among a thousand of the most delight- 
ful reminiscences that were ever treasured, she has told me 
a great deal of Scott, who visited at her mother's as a boy. 
She remembers him then as a good humoured lad, but very 
fond of fun, who used to take her youngest sister (Anna 
Maria) and frighten her by holding her out of the window 

Miss P had not seen him since that age ; but, after the 

appearance of Guy Mannering, she heard that he was in 
Xondon, and drove with a friend to his house. Not quite 
sure (as she modestly says) of being remembered, she sent 

in a note, saying, that if he remembered the P s, whom 

he used to visit, Jane would like to see him. He came 
rushing to the door, and exclaimed, " Remember you ! Miss 

P !" and threw his arms about her neck and burst into 

tears. After this he corresponded constantly with the family, 
and about the time of his first stroke of paralysis, when his 
mind and memory failed him, the mother of Miss P — — 
died, and Scott sent a letter of condolence. It began — 
*' Dear Miss P— — " — but, as he went on, he forgot him- 
self, and continued the letter as if addressed to her mother, 

ending it with — " And now, dear Mrs P , farewell ! 

and believe me yours for ever, (as long as there is anything 
of me) "Walter Scott." Miss P bears testimony, 



HAWICK. 443 

e every one else who knew him to his greatheartedness 
no less than to his genius. 

I am not sure that others like as well as myself these 
"nothings" about men of genius. I would rather hear the 
conversation between Scott and a peasant on the road, for, 
example than the most piquant anecdote of his brighter 
hours. I like a great mind in dishabille. 

We returned by Melrose Abbey, of which I can say 
nothing new, and drove to Dryburgh to see the grave of 
Scott. He is buried in a rich old Gothic corner of a ruin — 
fittingly. He chose the spot, and he sleeps well. The sun- 
shine is broken on his breast by a fretted and pinnacled 
window, overrun with ivy, and the small chapel in which 
he lies is open to the air, and ornamented with the moulder- 
ing scutcheons of his race. There are few more beautiful 
ruins than Dryburgh Abbey, and Scott lies in its sunniest 
and most fanciful nook — a grave that seems divested of the 
usual horrors of a grave. 

We were ascending the Gala- water at sunset, and supped 
at Dalhousie, after a day crowded with thought and feeling* 



LETTER XXXI. 

HAWICK ROAD TO CARLISLE — CARLISLE — LANCASTER 

HALL. 

Oct. 1834. 

If Scott had done nothing else, he would have deserved well 
of his country for giving an interest to the barren wastes 
by which it is separated from England. " A* the blue 
bonnets " must have had a melancholy march of it over the 
border. From Fala-water to Carlisle it might be any where 
a scene for the witches' meeting in Macbeth. We bowled 
away, at nearly twelve miles in the hour, however, (which 
would unwind almost any "Serpent of care" from the 
heart) and if the road was not lined with witches and 
moss troopers, it was well macadamized. I got a treacherous 
supper at Hawick, where the Douglas pounced upon Sir 



44.4 PENCILLING:* JY THE WAY. 

Alexander Ramsay, and recovering ray good humour at 
Carlisle, grew happier as the fields grew greener, and came 
down hy Kendal and its green vallies, with the speed of an 
arrow, and the light-heartedness, of its feather. How little 
the farmer thinks when he plants his hedges and sows his 
fields, that the passing wayfarer will anticipate the gleaners, 
and gather sunshine from his ripening harvest. 

I was admiring the fine old Castle of Lancaster, (now 
desecrated to the purposes of a county gaol) when our 
thirteen-mile-whip ran over a phaeton standing quietly in 
the road, and spilt several women and children, as you may 
say, en passant. The coach must arrive, though it 
kill as many as Juggernaut, and John neither changed 
colour nor spoke word, but laid the silk over his leaders to 
make-up the backwater of the jar, and rattled away up the 
street with the guard blowing the French-horn to the air 
of " Smile again my bonnie lassie.'* Nobody threw stones 
after us : the horses were changed in a minute and three 
quarters, and away we sped from the town of the (c red rose." 
There was a cool, you-know-where-to.find-me sort of indif- 
ference in this adventure which is peculiarly English. I 
suppose if his leaders had changed suddenly into griffins, he 
would have touched them under the wing and kept his 
pace. 

Bound on a visit to Hall, in Lancashire. I left the 

<coach at Preston. The landlady of the Red Lion became 
very suddenly anxious that I should not take cold when she 
found out the destination of her post-chaise. I arrived just 
after sunset at my friend's lodge, — and, ordering the post- 
illion to a walk, drove leisurely through the gathering twi- 
light to the Hall. It was a mile of winding road, through 
the peculiarly delicious scenery of an English park, the game 
visible in every direction, and the glades and woods dis- 
posed with that breadth and luxuriance of taste that makf, 
make the country-houses of England, palaces in Arcadia. 
Anxious as I had been to meet my friend, whose hospitality 
I had before experienced in Italy, I was almost sorry 
when the closely-shaven sward, and glancing lights in- 
formed me that my twilight drive was near its end. 

An arrival in a strange house in England seems to a 
foreigner almost magical. The absence of all the bustlfc 



ENGLISH HOSPITALITY. 445 

consequent on the same event abroad — the silence, respect- 
fulness, and self-possession of the servants — the ease and 
expedition with which he is installed in a luxurious room, 
almost with his second breath under the roof — his portman- 
teau unstrapped, his toilet laid out, his dress-shoes and 
stocliings at his feet, and the fire burning as if he had sat 
by it the whole day — it is like the golden facility of 
a dream, " Dinner at seven V are the only words he has 
heard, and he finds himself (some three minutes having 
elapsed since he was on the road) as much at home as if 
he had lived there all his life, and pouring the hot water 
into his wash-basin with the feeling that comfort and luxury 
in this country are very much matters of course. 

The bell rings for dinner, and the new comer finds his 
way to the drawing-room. He has not seen his host, 
perhaps, for a year ;but his entree is anything but a scene, 
A cordial shake of the hand, a simple inquiry after his 
health, while the different members of the family collect in 
the darkened room, and the preference of his arm by the 
lady of the house, to walk into dinner, are all that would 
remind him that he and his host had ever parted. The 
soup is criticised, the weather " resumed," as the French 
have it; gravity prevails, and the wine that he used to 
drink is brought him, without question, by the remember- 
ing butler. The stranger is an object of no more attention 
than any other person, except in the brief " glad to see 
you/* and the accompanying just-perceptible nod with 
which the host drinks wine with him ; and not even in the 
abandon of after-dinner conversation are the minutest re- 
miniscences of the host and his friend sufficient to intrude 
on the indifferent portion of the company. The object is. 
the general enjoyment, and you are not permitted to mo- 
nopolize the sympathies of the house. You thus escape the 
aversion with which even a momentary favourite is looked 
upon in society, and in your turn you are not neglected, or 
bored with a sensation, on the arrival of another. In what 
other country is civilization carried to the same rational 
I perfection ? 

I was under the hands of a physician during the week of 

my stay at Hall, and only crept out with the lizards 

for a little sunshine at noon. There was shooting in the 



446 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAT 

park for those who liked it, and fox-hunting in the neigh- 
bourhood for those who could follow ; hut I was content 
(upon compulsion) to be innocent of the blood of hares and 
partridges, and the ditches of Lancashire are innocent of 
mine. The well-stocked library, with its caressing chairs, 
was a paradise of repose after travel, and the dinner, with 
Its delightful society, sufficed for the day's event. 

My host was himself very much of a cosmopolite ; but 
his neighbours, one or two most respectable squires of the 
old school among them, had the usual characteristics of 
people who have passed their lives on one spot, and though 
gentlemanlike and good-humoured, were rather difficult to 
amuse. 1 found none of the uproariousness which distin- 
guished the Squire Western of other times. The hale fox- 
hunter was in white cravat and black coat, and took wine 
and politics moderately, and his wife and daughters, though 
silent and impracticable, were well-dressed, and marked by 
that indefinable stamp of blood visible no less in the gentry 
than in the nobility of England. 

I was delighted to encounter at my friend's table one or 
two of the old English peculiarities, gone out nearer the 
metropolis. Toasted cheese and spiced ale, " familiar crea- 
tures " in common life, were here served up with all the 
circumstance that attended them, when they were not dis- 
dained as the allowance of maids of honour. On the dis- 
appearance of the pastry, a massive silver dish, chased with 
the ornate elegance of ancient plate, holding coals beneath, 
and protected by a hinged cover, was set before the lady of 
the house. At the other extremity of the table stood a 
" peg tankard " of the same fashion, in the same massive 
metal, with two handles, and of an almost fabulous capacity. 
Cold cheese and port were at a discount. The celery, albeit 
both modish and popular, was neglected. The crested cover 
erected itself on its hinge, and displayed a flat surface 
covered thinly with blistering cheese, with a soup^on of 
brawn in its complexion, quivering and delicate, and of a 
most stimulating odour. A little was served to each guest, 
and commended as it deserved ; and then the flagon's lid. 
was lifted in its turn by the staid butler, and the master of 
the house drank first. It went around with the sun, not 
•disdained by the ladies* lips in passing, and came to me. 



THE OLDEN TIME, 44? 

something lightened of its load. As a stranger I was ad- 
vised of the law before lifting it to my head. Within, from 
the rim to the bottom, extended a line of silver pegs, sup- 
posed to contain, in the depth from one to the other, a fair 
draught for each bibber. The flagon must not be taken 
from the lips, and the penalty of drinking deeper than the 
first peg below the surface was to drink to the second, — a 
task for the Friar of Copmanhurst. As the visible measure 
was of course lost when the tankard was dipped, it required 
some practice or a cool judgment, not to exceed the draught. 
Raising it with my two hands, I measured the distance with 
my ey% and watching till the floating argosy of toast should 
swim beyond the reach of my nose, The spicy odour as- 
cended gratefully to the brain. The cloves and cinnamon 
clung in a dark circle to the edges. 1 drank without draw- 
ing breath, and complacently passed the flagon. As the sea 
of ale settled to a calm, my next neighbour silently returned 
the tankard — I had exceeded the draught. There was a 
general cry of ei drink ! drink ! " and, sounding my remain- 
ing capacity with the plummet of a long breath, I laid my 
hands once more on the vessel, and should have paid the 
penalty or perished in the attempt, but for the grace shown 
me as a foreigner, at the intercession of that sex distin- 
guished for its mercy. 

This adherence to the more hearty viands and customs of 
olden time, by the way, is an exponent of a feeling sus- 
tained with peculiar tenacity in that part of England. 
Cheshire and Lancashire are the stronghold of that race, 
peculiar to this country, the gentry. In these countries 
the peerage is no authority for gentle birth. A title unsup- 
ported by centuries of honourable descent is worse than 
nothing, and there is many a squire living in his immemo- 
rial " Hall" who would not exchange his name and pedi- 
gree for the title of ninety-nine in a hundred of the nobility 
of England : here reigns aristocracy, Your Baron Roths- 
child, or your new- created Lord from the Bank or the 
Temple, might build palaces in Cheshire, and live years in 
the midst of its proud gentry, unvisited. They are the 
cold cheese, celery, and port, in comparison with the toasted 
cheese and spiced ale. 



448 PENCILLINGS I3Y THE VAY. 



LETTER XXXII. 

LIVERPOOL AMERICAN IMPORTATIONS — THE RAILWAY 

— HALL — CONCLUSION. 

Oct. 1834. 

England would be a more pleasant country to travel in, if 
one's feelings took root with less facility. In continental 
countries the local ties are those of the rnind and the senses ; 
in England they are those of the affections. One wanders 
from Italy to Greece, and from Athens to Ephesus, and 
returns and departs again ; and, as he gets on ship-board, 
or mounts his horse or his camel, it is with a sigh over 
some picture or statue left behind — some temple or water- 
fall — perhaps some cask or vintage. He makes his last 
visit to the Fount of Egeria, or the Venus of the Tribune 
— to the Caryatides of the Parthenon or the Cascatelles of 
Tivoli — or pathetically calls for his last bottle of untrans- 
ferable lagrima Christi, or his last cotelettes pivvengales. 
He has " five hundred friends," like other people, and has 
made the usual continental intimacies; but his valet de 
place takes charge of his adieux — (distributes his "p. p. 
c.V for a penny each) — and he forgets and is forgotten of 
those he leaves behind, ere his passport is recorded at the 
gates. In all these countries it is only as a resident or a 
native that you are treated with kindness, or admitted to 
the penetralia of domestic life. You are a bird of passage, 
expected to contribute a feather for every nest, but welcomed 
to none. In England this same disqualification becomes a 
claim. The name of a stranger opens the private house, 
sets you the chair of honour, prepares your bed, and makes 
everything that can contribute to your comfort or pleasure 
temporarily your own : and when you take your departure, 
your host has informed himself of your route, and provided 
you with letters to his friends, and you may go through the 
country from end to end, and experience everywhere the 
same confiding and liberal hospitality. Every foreigner 
who has come well introduced to England knows how 
imexaggerated is this picture. 



A LIVERPOOL INN. 44?9 

I was put upon the road again by my kind friend, and, 
with a strong west wind coming off the Atlantic, drove 
along, within sound of the waves, on the road to Liverpool, 
It was a mild wind and came with a welcome, for it was 
freighted with the thoughts of home. Goethe says we are 
never separated from our friends as long as the streams run 
down from them to us. Certain it is, that distance seems 
less that it is measured by waters and winds. America 
seemed near, with the ocean at my feet, and only its waste 
paths between. I sent my heart over, (against wind and 
tide) with a blessing and a prayer. 

There are good inns, I believe, at Liverpool ; but the 
coach put me down at the dirtiest and worst specimen of a 
public-house that I have encountered in Engiand. As I 
was to stay but a night, I overcame the prejudice of a first 
coup-d'ceil, and mad-e the best of a dinner in the coffee- 
room. It was crowded with people — principally merchants, 
I presumed; and the dinner-hour having barely passed, 
most of them were sitting over their wine and toddy at the 
small tables, discussing prices, or reading the newspapers. 
Near me were two young men, whose faces I thought 
familiar to me, and, with a second look, I resolved them 
into two of my countrymen, who, I found out presently 
by their conversation, were eating their first dinner in 
England. They were gentlemanlike young men, of good 
education, and I pleased myself with looking about and 
imagining the comparison they would draw, with their own 
country fresh in their recollection, between it and this. I 
could not help feeling how erroneous, in this case, would 
be a first impression. The gloomy coffee-room, the hurried 
and uncivil waiters, the atrocious cookery, the bad air, 
greasy tables, filthy carpet, and unsocial company — and this 
<me of the most popular and crowded inns of the first com- 
mercial town in England ! My neighbours themselves, too, 
afforded me some little speculation. They were a fair spe- 
cimen of the young men of our country, and after several 
years' exclusive conversance with other nations, I was 
curious to compare an untravelled American with the 
Europeans around me. I was struck with the exceed- 
ing ambiiiousness of their style of conversation. Dr. Pan- 
gloss himself would have given them a degree. They called 

2 G 



450 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

nothing by its week-day name, and avoided with singular 
pertinacity exactly that upon which the modern English 
are as pertinaciously bent — a concise homeliness of phraseo- 
logy. They were dressed much better than the people 
about them, (who were apparently in the same sphere of 
life) and had, on the whole, a superior air — owing possibly 
to the custom prevalent in America, of giving young men a 
university education before they enter into trade. Like 
.myself, too, they had not yet learned the English accom- 
plishment of total unconsciousness of the presence of others. 
When not conversing they did not study profoundly the 
grain of the mahogany, nor gaze with solemn earnestness 
into the bottom of their wine-glasses, nor peruse with the 
absorbed fixedness of Belshazzar, the figures on the walL 
They looked about them with undisguised curiosity, ordered 
a great deal more wine than they wanted, (very American 
that !) and were totally without the self-complacent, self- 
amused, sober-felicity air which John Bull assumes after his 
cheese in a coffee-room. 

I did not introduce myself to my countrymen, for an 
American is the last person in the world with whom one 
should depart from the ordinary rules of society. Having 
no fixed rank, either in their own or a foreign country, they 
construe all uncommon civility into either a freedom, or a 
desire to patronize, and the last is the unpardonable sin. 
They called, after a while, for a " mint julep,'' (unknown 
in England) for slippers, (rather an unusual call also — 
gentlemen usually wearing their own) and seemed very 
much surprised, on asking for candles, at being ushered to 
bed by the chambermaid. 

I passed the next morning in walking about Liverpool. 
It is singularly like New York in its general air, and quite 
like it in the character of its population. I presume I must 
have met many of my countrymen, for there were some who 
passed me in the street, whom I could have sworn to. In 
a walk to the American consul's, (to whose polite kindness 
I, as well as all my compatriots, have been very much in- 
debted, I was lucky enough to see a New- York packet 
drive into the harbour under full sail — as gallant a sight as 
you would wish to see. It was blowing rather stiffly, and 
she ran up to her anchorage like a bird, and, taking in her 



LIVERPOOL RAILWAY. 451 

canvass with the speed of a man-of-war, was lying in a few 
moments with her head to the tide, as neat and as tranquil 
as if she had slept for the last month at her moorings. I 
could feel in the air that came ashore from her that I had 
letters on hoard. 

Anxious to get on to Cheshire, where, as they say of the 
mails, I had been due some days, and very anxious to get 
rid of the perfume of beer, beef- steaks, and bad soap, with 
which 1 had become impregnated at the inn, I got embarked 
in an omnibus at noon, and was taken to the Railway. 1 
was just in time ; and down we dived into the long tunnel, 
emerging from the darkness at a pace that made my hair 
sensibly tighten and hold on with apprehension. Thirty 
miles in the hour is pleasant going, when one is a little 
accustomed to it. It gives one such a contempt for time 
and distance. The whizzing past of the return-trains, 
going in the other direction with the same velocity, — 
making you recoil in one second, and a mile off the next, 
was the only thing which after a few minutes I did not 
take to very kindly. There were near a hundred pas*- 
sengers, most of them precisely the class of English whicfe 
we see in our country — the fags of Manchester and 
Birmingham ; a class, I dare say, honest and worthy* 
but much more, to my taste, in their own country 
than mine. 

I must confess to a want of curiosity touching spinning- 
jennies. Half an hour of Manchester contented me ; yet 
in that half-hour I was cheated to the amount of four and 
sixpence, — unless the experience was worth the money. 
Under a sovereign I think it not worth while to lose my 
temper; and I contented myself with telling the man, (he 
was a coach-proprietor) as I paid him the second time 
for the same thing in the course of twenty minutes, that 
the time and trouble he must have had in bronzing his 
face to that degree of impudence gave him some title to 
the money. I saw some pretty scenery between Man- 
chester and my destination; and, having calculated my 
time very accurately, I was set down at the gates of 
■ Hall as the dressing-bell for dinner came over the 

park upon the wind. I found another English welcome, 

r t G 2 



452 PENC1LLINGS BY THE WAY. 

— passed three weeks amid the pleasures of English 
country-life, — departed, as before, with regrets, — and 
without much more incident or adventure reached, Lon- 
don. 



LETTER XXXIII 

CO VENT-GARDEN THEATRD — BRIGHTON — WALLACE. 

Theatrical amusement, which in other places serves as a 
vent to enthusiasm, or as a safety-valve to the suppressed 
stillness of common life, is in London so much less exciting 
than every-day routine, that it must be unusual attraction 
to take one to Covent-Garden or Drury-Lane. On my 
first two years in England, I was only once in either the- 
atre, albeit fond of a play, and a day or two since I found 
myself hesitating between Henry V. at seven, and a May 
Fair dinner at eight, — decided in favour of the play at last 
by the appealing look of a schoolboy brother-in-law, who 
was to be my companion. 

After a cup of coffee at Verey's, somewhat to encourage 
the digestive process of a hasty and indifferent " beefsteak 
at lodgings," I embarked my handsome and intelligent 
little friend in what he called an " omnibus chop," (a newly- 
invented cab, like the end of an omnibus upon two wheels,) 
and threading all the intricacies of St. Giles's and the Seven 
Dials, we were set down for a shilling at the door of Co- 
vent-Garden. <A shilling (much more easily earned) pro- 
cured us the notice of the box-keeper, who seated us near 
the stage, and I had just time to point out Mr. Babbidge 
the calculator, who happened to be three seats from us, 
when the curtain rose and discovered " Time the chorus, ,? 
in beard, scythe, and russet. 

VandenhofF delivered this and the succeeding speeches 
of Time, (one at the beginning of every act, you remem- 
ber) with " good emphasis and discretion." As he went 
on, the clouds, which the lifting of the curtain had dis- 
closed, rolled up and away, and superb tableaux glided past, 



COVENT-GARDEN THEATRE. 453? 

representing; the scene and personages of the act that was 
to follow. This was Stanfield's work, and noth/ng could 
possibly be more admirable and magnificent than :he draw- 
jng and effect. The king's embarkation at Southampton, 
the passage of the fleet, its arrival in France, the siege of 
Harfleur, the French and English camps, and watch-fires, 
the king's pavilion, &c. were all pictures done in the high- 
est style of art. It was wonderful how this double repre- 
sentation, this scenic presentment to the eye, added to the 
interest and meaning of the play. Light as the mere dra- 
matic interest of Henry V. is, it kept us on the stretch of 
excitement from the opening to the close. 

There was no chance for Macready's acting, of course, in 
Henry V. ; but he was most carefully and sumptuously- 
dressed, and walked through his part with propriety, failing 
only in the love-scene with Katherine at the close, which 
he made, I thought, unnecessarily coarse and rude. Miss 
VandenhofT (who has sailed for America,) looked extremely 
handsome in the character, besides playing it capitally 
well. Pistol was shockingly overdone, and the best played 
part of all, to my thinking, was the French Herald. Al- 
together, the play, as all London has acknowledged, was 
exceedingly creditable to Macready's taste, as well as his 
liberality and enterprise, and I hope, with all my heart, that 
the plan for building him a theatre, to be devoted exclu- 
sively to the legitimate drama, will be speedily put in opera- 
tion. 

A night or two after, I was at Covent-Garden again, to see 
Bulwer's new play of Richelieu. It was gorgeously got up, 
and the dramatic points were elaborated and studied 
with the nicest knowledge of the actor. I looked in vain 
for the passages I had admired in reading the play. They 
were mercilessly cut out — but with only (it seemed to me,) 
a single poetical passage — Richelieu's address to his pen, 
the action of the piece kept up an unbroken and intense in- 
terest in the house. It proved to me, what I have thought 
ever since I first saw a new play produced, that more than 
half the success of the best production depends oaths skill 
and scissors of the manager. 

And talking of managers, I have taken, since my last 
letter, what is called in England a frisk, and in the course 



454 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY 

of my circuit through Surrey and Sussex, passed one day 
very delightfully with Wallack at Brighton. Here found 
I our gay Prospero of the " National/' with his household 
gods and his beautiful boys all about him, as much at home, 
though you scarce miss him in his flittings from NewYork, 
as the most inveterate promenader upon the Cliff — the 
c * How d'ye do," of his hundred acquaintances no more 
dramatic, though he was arrived but a week or two from 
America, nor his hospitalities less ample and particular, 
though he was to mount in twelve hours the chain-light- 
ning of the Age-coach, rail-road, and steamer, to do the 
three thousand miles back again in a fortnight. Shaks- 
peare's Ariel is like to turn out a very common lad, if travel 
goes on improving. 

Brighton is like a great city, built entire, and at one job, 
to order. It is fresh and modern all over. It looks finished 
too ; for there is no sign of building, and in that it is unlike 
an American city. Wallack did the honours of the town 
with great kindness, lionizing us in his " leathern conve- 
nience" from end to end of the superb " cliffs" — which cliffs 
are broad streets, beautifully Macadamised, with rows of 
palaces on one side, and the surf of the sea on the other. 
I think the two cliffs, which form a crescent with the 
queen's pavilion, and the chain-pier in the centre, are some- 
thing more than three miles long. The most magnificent 
feature in this long terrace, is a succession of squares re- 
ceding from the beach, and with one side open to the sea : 
the houses are of a very highly ornamented style of build- 
ing, and surmounted with balconies, low windows and bel- 
videres, so as to command from every room and chamber 
a prospect of the sea. These three-sided squares are all 
large, with an inclosed park in the centre, and in such a 
windy place as Brighton, form very snug and sheltered 
promenades to the slender-legged invalid, and the sail-car- 
rying-dame. Kemp Town, as it is called, forms the eastern 
extremity of the horn, and the square last built, though 
standing a hundred feet above the beach, has subterranean 
passages running under the street, and connecting every 
house with baths on the sea. This is the finest bit of 

Brighton in point of architecture, and in one of its plainest 

louses lives the Duke of Devonshire 



BRIGHTON. 456 

The other features of the cliffs are small phaetons to let, 
for children, drawn each by a pair of goats, well groomed 
and appointed ; hand-carriages for invalids ; all sorts of 
pony-chaises sputtering about with fat ladies, and furnished 
invariably with the smallest conceivable boy behind ; any 
quantity of lumbering " double flys," or two-horse coaches, 
drawn by one wretched skeleton of an animal, and occu- 
pied usually by a fat cit and his numerous family ; great 
numbers of remarkably single-looking ladies, hanging to 
their parasols with one hand and fighting the wind out of 
their petticoats with the other ; yellow-visaged East In- 
dians forgetting their livers while they watch the struggles 
of these unwilling seronauts; here and there a dandy, 
looking blue and damp with the chill of the salt air ; and 
all along the beach, half in the water and half in the sand, 
in singular contrast to all this townishness, groups of rough 
sailors cleaning their boats, drying their nets, and cooking 
their messes on cross sticks, apparently as unconscious of 
the luxury and magnificence on the other side of the street, 
as if it were a mirage on the horizon. 

The royal pavilion is not on the sea, and all you can see 
of it from the street, is a great number of peaked balloons, 
some small and some large, which peer above the shrub- 
bery and wall, like the tops of the castors beyond a dish of 
salad. Whether it was this appetising spectacle, or the 
chill of the air in a very agreeable though a very dampish 
drive, I was never more pleased at the conclusion of a day 
than with the turtle-soup, turbot, and turkey, with which 
Wallack wound up the wonders of Brighton. I know what 
the critics think of travellers who venture to acknowledge 
that they eat, but I must summon up courage to record 
the fact, that this was a glorious dinner, gloriously done 
justice to, and the critics may take their will of me. 

The seed of this great flower upon the sea-side, was a 
whim of George the Fourth's, and to the excessive fright of 
the Brighthelmstonians, little Victoria has taken a particu- 
lar dislike to it, and makes her visits briefer and briefer. 
The population, with the exception of tradespeople, and a 
small circle of professional persons, and invalid families, is 
as transient as that of Saratoga and if her Majesty should 
succeed in making the place unfashionable, Persepolis and 



466 PENCILLINGS BY* THE WAY. 

Thebes will be a joke to it. The last and newest specula- 
tor is Nugee, the tailor, who has invested a small fortune 
in some superb houses at Kemp Town, and he is likely to 
keep up his character as" the sufferer." 



LETTER XXXIV. 



THE ELEPHANT AND CASTLE — ITINERANT VENDORS OP 
CHEAP WARES — NEWS-BOYS — CADS. 

Left London again by coach for the Vicarage of B in 

Sussex. Our fellow " insides" were a stout, farmer-look- 
ing man with the rheumatism, attended by a very pretty 
maid-servant, who, after helping him in, mounted to the 
box with the driver, and a spinster-looking lady with a 
wintry bloom on her cheek, who had brought a copy of 
Young's Night Thoughts, to read on the road, but fell 
asleep before we reached the " Elephant and Castle/' and 
kept nodding with her mouth wide open and a sweet smile 
on her face for thirty miles. Our waking companion con- 
fined his remarks to the ripeness of the corn in the different 
fields we passed, and we had, consequently, one window of 
the coach and our attention to ourselves. 

The M Elephant and Castle" is perhaps the most amusing 
point on this side of London ; but having omitted to de- 
scribe it, before it became familiarized to me, I am at a loss 
how to convey to you the features which strike a stranger, 
and which indeed, are the only ones by which any idea of it 
could be conveyed in a description. The inn (of which the 
sign is an elephant with a castle on his back,) stands at 
the confluence of all the roads which lead southward out 
of London. It is about a mile from Charing-cross, and a 
mile from London-bridge, the two ivrists of the great me- 
tropolis. The west-end and city coaches for Brighton and 
Dover have branch coaches, which bring passengers from 
the opposite end of London to this point; and for the pur- 
pose of meeting these, and taking up passengers who come 
hither from every point in the cabs and private carriages, 



ELEPHANT AND CASTLE — NEWS-BOYS. 457 

every coach makes a stop here of twenty minutes. This 
is the great starting point also of innumerable omnibuses to 
every quarter of town and city, a great stand for jarveys, 
cabs, &c. and a nest of eating-houses, ale-houses, and gin- 
shops. Of course here assemble ail itinerant vendors of 
cheap razors, cheap pen-knives, ballads, oranges, soda- 
water, and watch-guards, and of all these articles, as you sit 
in the coach, you have the offer in most eloquent Cockney 
and Irish, for prices ridiculously trifling. The two aristo- 
cratic races of loungers at the " Elephant" however, are 
news-boys — who carry in one hand the Times, Herald, and 
other respectable papers, and in the other the Paul Pry, 
Satirist, Crim Con Gazette, &c. — and the cads and helpers 
to the coaches, who live by sixpences for putting up bag- 
gage, calling cabs, and arresting distant omnibuses, and by 
picking up what "* gentlemen" dropout of their pockets in 
the hurry of departure. The Elephant and Castle is the 
High College of slang, and these two last classes are its 
professors. Here originate all those brilliant expressions 
characteristic of U Life in London," the " All round my 
hat/' " Does your mother know you're out?" &c, familiar 
to all readers of flash papers, sporting chronicles, &c. 

The dresses and manners of these two classes of slang 
makers are widely different. The newsman wears the worst 
possible hat, usually decorated with a crape, a black coat of 
the highest polish by grease and rain, no shirt, but a very 
smart black glass breast-pin, holding together the stringy 
ends of his cravat and the remains of a silk pocket-hand- 
kerchief, stuck in his breast when it does not rain — spread 
over his newspapers when it does. The moment the coach 
stops, four " daily's" arranged like a fan are thrust before 
your eyes, entirely closing the coach-window, (if you are 
conversing with a friend, or watching the purloining of 
your carpet-bag, it is all one,) and immediately follows the 
one speech for the day, conned as regularly as a school- 
boy's lesson, and intended to convey an inviting picture of 
the news within. ie 'Oospipper, Sir! Buy the morning 
pippers. Sir ! Times, Herald, Crinnicle, and Munning Post, 
Sir! — contains Lud Brum's entire innihalation of Lud 
Nummanby — Leddy Flor' Esting's murder by Lord Mil- 
bun and them maids o T honour — debate on the Groolty — - 



458 PENCILLING!* EY THE WAY. 

Harlnimais Bill, and a fatil catstrophy in conskens of 
Loosfer matches ! Which '11 y'have, Sir ? Sixpence, only 
sixpence !" Here he pauses for a reply, getting a look at 
your face between the spread corners of his fan, which 
proving unpromising', he raises the contents of his left hand, 
another expanded fan, ingeniously exposing the names of 
all the scandal chronicles of the metropolis. His recom- 
mendation of these is invariably in a suppressed and con- 
fidential tone. " Vot do you say to the Paul Pry, Sir ! 
Here they be — Crim-Con Gazette, Age, Satirist. You 
can't conceive, Sir ! 'Vy all the sins o* the vest end-are 
there, Sir, with the most hinteresting partiklers ! See that 
picter ! Ain't that veil done ? There's Bochsa, Sir, a- 
makin o'love to Missus Bishop — natral as life ! I've seed 
'em often ! Buy it, Sir ! Take 'em all for sixpence ! Do y 
Sir." This touching appeal having failed at both windows, 
he commences the first speech again to the outside passen- 
gers, usually designating the individual, at whose attention 
he aims by some personal peculiarity. " You, Sir, with 
that werry genteel pattern of a veskit," — or " the gemman 
the bar-maid is a-oglin out o' the vinder. Yes, Sir ! — she's 
smit with your gold spectacles, and no mistake ! Buy the 
Munning Post, Sir!" 

The cad is quite another style of person. He is dressed 
in a drab, slashy-looking, painfully-shabby driving coat, 
made originally for a man of twice his stature, and having 
one solitary and superb relic of its former glory, in a single 
huge mother-o'-pearl button, left somewhere on the breast. 
His hat is rigidly small-rimmed, and pulled over his left eye 
as pertinaciously as if he were taking sight by the hollow 
and well-worn crescent of felt, which shows the pull of his 
thumb. His nose is purple, the carbuncles of the gin and 
beer contending with the lividness of perpetual chill, from 
standing out of doors ; and the most worn spots in his 
coat, oddly enough, are the two shoulders, either from his 
habit of always nudging the next cad with his * I say, 
Bob!" when he is about saying something* witty, or from 
leaning by the hour against the post of the gin-shop. As 
he never takes his hands from his coat pockets, except to 
receive a sixpence, or square away for a fight, his shoulders 
naturally do all the reminding, shoving, and leaning, be- 



cads. 459 

sides most adroitly supplying the place occasionally of 
both hand and pocket-handkerchief to the above-mentioned 
purple organ. The cad is never a fool ; indeed he requires 
to have great quickness, uncommon impudence, wit, and 
courage. He is usually some turned-ofF tiger, who proved 
too wicked for a recommendation, or a second-rate boxer 
who is within one, of Molyneux and Dutch Sam, and pro- 
bably has seen life in many shapes, and the inside of most 
prisons before he is sufficiently reduced and accomplished 
to be willing to turn cad, and steal and bully under 
the very noses of the police. I should have mentioned, 
that amid the crowd at " the Elephant" are constantly 
seen perambulating three or four policemen in their blue 
coats and glazed hats, ready to pounce upon every offender; 
but meantime on joking and drinking terms with the unde- 
tected cads and newsmen. It is very unwise to be savage 
with the cad, and it is rather uncomfortable to decline his 
services when he sees that you might get on the better for 
them. The best way is to accept his offer at once, to tell 
him exactly what you want, and so be rid of all his frater- 
nity, and your own embarrassment. It is a kind of sixpenny 
toll levied in favour of the brotherhood, which is best paid 
without grumbling, unless you are very well acquainted at 
" the Elephant." I was very much amused, a week or two 
since, with the power of description displayed by one of 
these gentry. Staying with a friend about ten miles from 
London, and having occasion to drive in town, I had re- 
quested my servant to wait for me at this spot — no omni- 
bus or coach going beyond " the Elephant" after mid- 
night. I arrived about two, and found a single maudlin 
cad see-sawing against the rail in front of the inn. " Vot's 
your honour looking arter ?" he asked, as I came up. " A 
servant of mine ! Have you seen one waiting about here ?" 
" Vot ! a flunkie vith blue plush and a skvint in his 
peeper?" " Exactly!" " Valk in and set down, your 
honour, and I'll bring him directly. He's taken up the 
road arter a young ooman as I knows, and I'll bring him 
while your honour smokes a cigar! " 

How he had remarked, drunk as he was, that the man 
wore blue piush breeches, and had a squint in his eye, (so 
slight that I did not myselT perceive it till he had been some 



460 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

days in my service,) must be accounted for by the general |, 
knowingness of the tribe. My officious friend soon brought 
the object of his search, helped him get out the cabriolet 
from a shut-up stable, wished me a " werry good night's 
Test," and after getting my shilling, levied a small'fine slily 
upon the man, for not telling where he found him. 



LETTER XXXV. 

KENILWORTH — PIERCE GAVESTON — Ht& EXECUTION AND 
CHARACTER — ASSOCIATIONS CONNECTED WITH KENIL- 
WORTH — ITALIAN BOY — CONTRAST BETWEEN DOMESTIC 
AND WANDERING HABITS — RUINS OF THE CASTLE — 
FEELINGS EXCITED BY A VISIT HERE — ANTIQUE FIRE- 
PLACE — MISS JANE PORTER — THE HISTORICAL RO- 
MANCE — COMMON HERD OF TOURISTS. 

On the road from Warwick to Kenilworth, I thought 
more of poor Pierce Gaveston than of Elizabeth and her 
proud earls. Edward's gay favourite was tried at Warwick, 
and beheaded on Blacklow Hill, which we passed soon 
after leaving the town. He was executed in June, and I 
looked about on the lovely hills and valleys that surround 
the place of his last moments, and figured to myself very 
vividly his despair at this hurried leave-taking of this 
bright world in its brightest spot and hour. Poor Gave- 
ston ! It was not in his vocation to die ! He was neither 
soldier nor prelate, hermit nor monk. His political sins, 
for which he suffered, were no offence against good-fellow- 
ship, and were ten times more venial than those of the 
*' black dog of Arden," Vho betrayed and helped to mur- 
der him. He was the reckless minion of a king, but he 
must have been a merry and pleasant fellow; and now 
that the world, (on our side the water at least,) is grown 
so grave, one could go back with Old Mortality, and freshen 
the epitaph of a heart that took life more gaily. 

As Ave approached the castle of the proud Leicester, I 
found it easier to people the road with the flying Amy 
Robsart and her faithful attendant, with Mike Lambourne, 
Flibbertigibbet, Richard Varney, and the troop of mum- 



KENILWORTH. 461 

mers and players, than with the more real characters of 
history. To assist the romance, a little Italian boy, with 
his organ and monkey, was fording the brook, on his way 
to the castle, as if its old towers still held listeners for the 
wandering minstrel. I tossed him a shilling from the car- 
riage window, and while the horses slowly forded the 
brook, asked him in his own delicious tongue*, where he was 
from. 

44 Son di Firenze, Signore!" 

44 And where are you going ?" 

44 Li! al castello." 

Come from Florence and bound to Kenilworth ! Wha 
would not grind an organ and sleep under a hedge, to an- 
swer the hail of the passing traveller in terms like these ? 
I have seen many a beggar in Italy, whose inheritance of 
sunshine and leisure in that delicious clime I could have 
found it in my heart to envy, even with all its concomitants 
of uncertainty and want; but here was a bright-faced and 
inky-eyed child of the sun, with his wardrobe and means 
upon his back, travelling from one land to another^ 
and loitering wherever there was a resort for pleasure, 
without a friend or a care ; and, upon my life, I could 
have donned his velveteen jacket, and with his cheerful 
heart to button it over, have shouldered his organ, put my 
trust in i forestieri, and kept on for Kenilworth. There 
really is, I thought, as I left him behind, no profit or re- 
ward consequent upon a life of confinement and toil ; no 
moss ever gathered by the unturned stone, that repays, by a. 
thousandth part, the loss of even this poor boy's share of 
the pleasures of change. What would not the tardy winner of 
fortune give to exchange his worn-out frame, his unloveable 
and furrowed features, hisdulled senses,and his vain regrets, 
for the elastic frame, the unbroken spirits, and the redeem- 
able, yet not oppressive poverty of this Florentine regazzo f 
The irrecoverable gem of youth is too often dissolved, like 
the pearl of Cleopatra, in a cup which thins the blood and 
leaves disgust upon the lip. 

The magnificent ruins of Kenilworth broke in upon my~ 
moralities, and a crowd of halt and crippled ciceroni beset 
the carriage-door as we alighted at the outer tower. The 
neighbourhood of the Spa of Leamington makes Kenil- 



462 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 

worth a place of easy resort; and the beggars of War- 
wickshire have discovered that your traveller is more libe- 
ral of his coin than your sitter-at-home. Some dozens of 
pony-chaises and small crop saddle-horses, clustered 
around the gate, assured us that we should not muse alone 
^tmid the ruins of Elizabeth's princely gift to her favourite. 
We passed into the tilt-yard, leaving on our left the tower 
in which Edward was confined, now the only habitable 
•part of Kenilworth. It gives a comfortable shelter to an 
old seneschal, who stands where the giant probably stood, 
with Flibbertigibbet under his doublet for a prompter ; but 
it is not the tail of a rhyme that serves now for a pass- 
port. 

Kenilworth, as it now stands, would probably disenchant 
almost any one of the gorgeous dreams conjured up by read- 
ing Scott's romance ; yet it is one of the most superb ruins 
in the world. It would scarce be complete to a novel- 
reader, naturally, without a warder at the gate, and the 
Hashing of a spear-point and helmet through the embra- 
sures of the tower. A horseman in armour should pace 
over the draw-bridge, and a squire be seen polishing 
his cuirass through the opening gate ; while on the airy 
bartizan should be observed a lady in hoop and farthingale, 
philandering with my Lord of Leicester in silk doublet and 
rapier. In the place of this, the visitor enters Kenilworth 
as I have already described, and stepping out into the tilt- 
yard, he sees, on an elevation before him, a fretted and 
ivy-covered ruin, relieved like a cloud-castle on the sky ; 
the bright blue plane of the western heavens shining through 
window and broken wall, flecked with waving and lux- 
uriant leaves, and the crusted and ornamental pinnacles of 
tottering masonry and sculpture just leaning to their fall, 
though the foundations upon which they were laid, one 
would still think, might sustain the firmament. The swell- 
ing root of a creeper has lifted that arch from its base, and 
the protruding branch of a chance-sprung tree, (sown per- 
haps by a field-sparrow,) has unseated the key-stone of 
the next ; and so perish castles and reputations, the ma- 
sonry of the human hand, and the fabrics of human fore- 
thought ; not by the strength which they feared, but by the 
weakness they despised! Li*Ue thought old John of 



*11SS JANE PORTER. 463 

Gaunt, when these rudely liewn blocks were heaved into 
their seat by his herculean workmen, that after resist- 
ing fire and foe, they would be sapped and overthrown at 
last by a vine-tendril and a sparrow! 

Clinging against the outer wall, on that side of the castle 
overlooking the meadow, which was overflowed for the 
aquatic sports of Kenilworth, stands an antique and highly 
ornamental fire-place, which belonged, doubtless, to the 
principal hall. The windows on either side looking forth 
upon the fields below, must have been those from which 
Elizabeth and her train observed the feats of Arion and his 
dolphin ; and at all times, the large and spacious chimney- 
place, from the castle's first occupation to its last, must 
have been the centre of the evening revelry and con- 
versation of its guests. It was a hook whereon to hang a 
reverie, and between the roars of vulgar laughter which as- 
sailed my ears from a party lolling on the grass below, I 
contrived to figure to myself, with some distinctness, the per- 
sonages who had stood about it. A visit to Kenilworth, with- 
out the deceptions of fancy, would be as disconnected from 
our previous enthusiasm on the subject as from any other scene 
with which it had no relation. The general effect at firsts 
in any such spot, is only to dispossess us, by a powerful 
violence, of the cherished picture we had drawn of it in 
imagination ; and it is only after the real recollection has 
taken root and ripened — after months, it may be — that we 
can fully bring the visionary characters we have drawn to 
inhabit it. If I read Kenilworth now, I see Mike Lam- 
bourne stealing out, not from the ruined postern which I 
clambered through, over heaps of rubbish, but from a little 
gate that turned noiselessly on its hinges, in the unreal 
castle built ten years ago in my brain. 

I had wandered away from my companion, Miss Jane 
Porter, to climb up a secret staircase in the wall, rather toe* 
difficult of ascent for a female foot, and from my elevated 
position I caught an accidental view of that distinguished 
lady through the arch of a gothic window, with a back 
ground of broken architecture and foliage, presenting, by 
chance, perhaps, the most fitting and admirable picture of 
the authoress of the Scottish Chiefs, that a painter in his 
brightest hour could have fancied. Miss Porter, with her 



/ £77f9? 

: 

464 PEKCILLINGS BY THE WAYr^ : 

tall and striking figure, her noble face, (said by Sir Martiri 
Sheeto have approached nearer in its youth to his beau ideal 
of the female features than any other, and still possessing 
the remains of uncommon beauty,) is at all times a, person 
whom it would be difficult to see without a feeling of in- 
voluntary admiration. But standing, as I saw her at that 
moment, motionless and erect, in the mourning dress, with 
.dark feathers, which she has worn since the death of her 
beloved and gifted sister, her wrists folded across, her large 
and still beautiful eyes fixed on a distant object in the 
view, and her nobly-cast lineaments reposing in their usual 
calm and benevolent tranquillity, while around and above 
her lay the material and breathed the spirit over which she 
had held the first great mastery — it was a tableau vivant 
which I was sorry to be alone to see. 

I have recorded here the speculations of a moment while 
I leaned over the wall of Kenilworth ; but as I descended 
by the giddy staircase, a peal of rude laughter broke from the 
party in the fosse below, and I could not but speculate on 
the difference between the various classes whom curiosity 
draws to the spot. The distinguished mind that conceives a 
romance which enchants the world, comes in the same guise, 
and is treated but with the same respect as theirs. The old 
porter makes no distinction in his charge of half-a-crown, 
and the grocer's wife who sucks an orange on the grass, 
looks at the dark crape hat and plain exterior, (her only 
standards,) and thinks herself as well dressed, and there- 
fore equal or superior to the tall lady, whom she presumes 
is out like herself, on a day's pleasuring. One comes and 
goes like the other, and is forgotten alike by the beggars at 
the gate and the seneschal within ; and thus invisibly and 
unsuspected, before our very eyes, does genius gather its 
golden fruit ; and while we walk in a plain and common- 
place world, with common-place and sordid thoughts and 
feelings, the gifted walk side by side with us in a world 
of their own — a world of which we see distant glimpses in 
their after creations, and marvel in what unsunned mine 
its gems of thought were gathered ! 



THE END, 



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